


Bad Blood

by coolbreeze1



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Team, Wraith
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-06
Updated: 2011-12-06
Packaged: 2017-10-27 00:21:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coolbreeze1/pseuds/coolbreeze1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Be careful, young man,” he said, his gaze intense as he stared at John. “I can see you enjoy a good adventure, but these creatures are not to be fooled with.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bad Blood

_Chapter 1_

“The Kankardesh,” the old man announced. He had planted himself across from Teyla at the small table the team now occupied. After spending hours early that day searching some nearby ruins, they had been ravenously hungry, and they had reached the village just as the sun was starting to set. In the waning light, Teyla had spotted a lively tavern and inn, and the four of them had quickly arranged rooms for the night and settled down in the tavern for dinner. The old man had joined them soon afterward, mildly curious about their business until John had mentioned the ruins.

Within minutes, the man—introducing himself as Marek the Farmer—had launched into storytelling mode, gathering more and more patrons around the table until most of the tavern had assembled to hear him. McKay had been convinced the ruins were of Ancient origin, dangling the possibility of a ZPM in front of John to convince him to search the place. Teyla had almost laughed out loud at the scientist’s obvious maneuverings—until she had realized she would be spending her entire day in the dark, dank, empty tunnels.

“What are the Kankardesh?” John asked with forced politeness.

Marek grimaced toothlessly, then took a swig from his mug. From a few knowing smiles Teyla caught among some of the villagers, the man in front of her seemed to have a reputation for spinning tales over a tankard of ale. He smacked his lips a few times before leaning in toward the Atlanteans. “The drinkers of blood,” he answered with a whisper loud enough for all to hear.

“Drinkers of blood?” McKay repeated, almost choking on his bite of food.

The old man nodded. “They live off of the lives of the innocent and unsuspecting. They drain the bodies of blood, leaving behind nothing more than a dried up husk of a body.”

“They steal the years of your life, adding it to their own,” someone else in the room piped up.

“This sounds familiar,” Teyla heard John mutter. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ronon’s hand tighten on his gun under the table.

“And have you seen any of these…Kankardesh? Do they live in the ruins?” McKay continued.

Most people shook their heads, but Marek was nodding. “Ach—no one knows where they live. But once, when I was a boy, I saw one. The legend says that anyone who sees one of these creatures will not survive the night, but I remember many years ago on my father’s farm, I woke up to the sound of the animals in the barn baying in full panic.”

More people gathered around the table, and Teyla resisted the urge to sigh. Marek drained the liquid from his cup and wiped his lips with his sleeve. He grinned as someone replaced his empty mug with a full one, and then he settled back into his chair, obviously enjoying the attention.

“The wind was blowing hard that night, and I was afraid another storm was coming in. That was the year of the big flood, you remember?” Murmurs of agreement ran through the crowd. Teyla caught McKay mid-eye roll and quickly covered a smile with her hand.

“I headed out toward the barn to calm the animals, when I heard a strange sound. I crept in through the back door, thinking that perhaps it was a thief. That was right before that itinerant band of animal thieves was caught, you remember?”

More murmurs of agreement, although most people were quiet, waiting for the old man to continue with his story. Teyla heard a barely concealed groan coming from Ronon’s direction.

“I snuck into the barn and made my way forward. I could barely hear a thing for all the howling of wind and screeching moans of animals.” Marek’s voice had grown quieter until the entire tavern was leaning forward, forced to strain their ears to hear his story.

“Then, all of a sudden…” The old man paused a moment before slamming his mug hard on the table. John jerked back in surprise at the sound. McKay—and about half the patrons in the tavern—yelped, and Ronon slowly slid his gun back into its holster. Teyla closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, feeling a headache building.

“Something in the shadows moved,” Marek picked up again. “I ducked into the nearest stall, covering myself with an old blanket and peering out a small hole. Whoever was in the barn had a lantern, and I could see their shadow flickering largely against the far wall as they walked down the length of the barn.”

Teyla sat up a little straighter at the description, finding herself being drawn into the story, and noticed her teammates doing the same thing.

“It passed too closely for me to really see it—right in front of my face—and I didn’t dare move for fear of drawing attention to my hiding spot. But I could hear it breathing heavily. And the smell! It smelled of death and rot. It was almost at the door, when it paused and looked right at the spot where I was hiding.”

“What did it look like?” McKay asked, wide-eyed.

Beside her, Teyla heard John muttering under his breath, but before she could decipher what he was saying, Marek continued on.

“I just caught a glimpse of it, but its skin was pale beyond anything I had ever seen, like it had never seen the light of day,” the old man continued, oblivious to John or anyone else. “It wore black leather clothes with strange patterns. Its long, stringy white hair hung in its face, but its eyes were yellow, and its mouth stained red.” The old man took another long drink, his hand shaking at the memory. “It was the most inhuman thing I have ever seen.”

The room was deadly still. Someone in the back called out, his voice subdued with either awe or horror. “Then what happened?”

“There was a howl outside, and the creature dove through the door, disappearing into the night. I never saw it again—couldn’t even speak of it for years—but the next morning, my father and I found one of our cattle dead in the middle of the field. It looked as if it had been aged beyond its years. We could not even use its meat. It was dried almost to dust.”

Teyla watched the old man drain his second mug of ale, then blink lazily into the empty cup.

“Thanks,” John said next to her. Teyla smiled, not quite sure how to respond, when their storyteller finally looked up.

“Be careful, young man,” he said, his gaze intense as he stared at John. “I can see you enjoy a good adventure, but these creatures are not to be fooled with.” With that, he stood up from the table and wandered away before any of them could respond.

That bit of sage advice, Teyla decided, would have been much more effective had the man not weaved and stumbled his way back toward the bar, waving his empty mug at the tavern keeper.

The murmur of low conversation began to hum again throughout the room and the crowd slowly filtered back toward their own tables. John looked around to make sure the locals were no longer eavesdropping on their every word, and the rest of them leaned their heads in to give them some semblance of privacy.

“I hope this satisfies everyone’s bedtime story quota for the day,” John murmured.

“That was the longest, most cliché-ridden story I have ever heard,” McKay griped, and Teyla winced at the volume of his voice. “Seriously? Marek the Farmer?”

“I liked it,” Ronon announced and Teyla almost laughed at the look of horror on McKay’s face.

“Obviously, he was talking about a Wraith,” she interjected before McKay could launch into the diatribe clearly building on the tip of his tongue.

“I’d say that was fairly obvious,” John jumped in.

“What do the Wraith have to do with the ruins?” Ronon asked.

John shook his head. “I didn’t quite catch that part.”

The others sat in silence for a few minutes, finishing up their meal. Now that she thought about it, the old man hadn’t talked about the ruins at all. Either there was some connection between what that place used to be and the Wraith, or the old man had just been looking for a captive audience. She looked up at the bar, where the old man was now regaling the bartender with another story of his childhood, his tankard once again full.

“You know what’s really odd? That guy was talking about the Wraith like something he hadn’t seen since he was a kid. This village isn’t that far from the ruins—if there were Wraith nearby, I would expect a little more panic or destruction, or at least something more than some old man’s story from forty years ago.”

“And I do not sense any Wraith here now,” Teyla added.

“Something just feels off about this whole situation. I can’t explain it.”

Teyla nodded in agreement. John was right—there was something odd going on, a feeling of unease niggling in the back of her head, but she couldn’t quite place it. Apparently, neither could the others. She felt a sudden sense of foreboding but shook it off.

“Maybe the energy readings McKay found in the ruins keep the Wraith away,” Ronon suggested.

“Hey, yeah, like the planet with the kids,” McKay added, snapping his fingers, but then he immediately began shaking his head. “No, that can’t be it. If these people had a shield strong enough to keep the Wraith out, I’d be picking up a lot more than just intermittent energy signals.”

They sat in silence, contemplating the information they had learned so far. Eventually John shook his head, and Teyla knew what he was thinking. It wasn’t enough—they needed to know more.

“Alright,” he said. “Let’s head up to the rooms and get some sleep. Tomorrow, we’ll split up and canvass the town. We need someone who knows the ruins who can help us.”

The others nodded in agreement. As Teyla stood up from her seat, she glanced around the tavern. Her gaze stopped on a young woman who appeared to be staring at John. One glance at her teammate told her John had noticed the woman as well.

The stranger brushed dark hair away from her face and smiled at John when their eyes met. John smiled back then quickly looked away as a large, grizzly looking man set two tankards on the woman’s table, sat down, and began whispering to her in earnest. As the others weaved through the tavern to the stairs that led to their rooms, Teyla glanced over at the young woman one last time and noticed how her eyes followed John through the room despite the grizzly looking man’s attempts to capture the woman’s attentions.

“’Night, young lady,” the toothless old man called out to Teyla as he staggered past, reeking of alcohol. Within minutes, a song had broken out, and Teyla made a quick exit out of the tavern and up to her room.

ooooooooooooooooooooo

A screeching howl rent the air, jarring Teyla from sleep. She lay there immobile in the darkness, allowing her eyes to adjust. In the pale moonlight filtering into the room, she saw John sit up in his bed and stare out the window. They listened for another moment, but the village was quiet.

Teyla sat up slowly and saw John look over at her. In the dark room, she could make out his silhouette standing up and slipping his feet into the boots next to his bed. He padded quietly up to the window.

“Do you see anything?” Teyla whispered.

John shook his head, then seemed to realize that Teyla probably couldn’t see him very well. “No,” he whispered back. “Whatever that was, the streets below are empty.”

They both turned at a sudden creaking sound in the hallway outside their room, and Teyla reached for her gun when someone fiddled with the doorknob. John had moved to the table beside his bed and grabbed his own weapon, and they both stilled in preparation.

“Sheppard? Teyla?” Ronon’s voice filtered through the closed door.

Teyla breathed a sigh of relief, setting her gun back down. “We are awake,” she said, speaking louder now that she realized they were all up.

The runner opened the door, letting the soft light from the hallway spill into the room. “You see anything?”

“No, nothing. Seems quiet out there now,” John answered. “McKay awake?”

Ronon grinned. “Yeah. Flew off the bed and rolled under it at the sound of that howl. I think that’s the fastest I’ve ever seen him move.”

Teyla couldn’t help the small smile that played across his lips—both at the image of McKay hiding under the bed and a little in pride that the scientist hadn’t slept through the sound completely.

“He’s trying to look out the window with mirrors now. Something about a…periscope?”

“What?” John asked, then immediately shook his head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Tell him to go back to bed. Everything’s quiet now.”

Ronon nodded then disappeared, shutting the door behind him. The room was plunged into darkness again, and John stepped back toward his own bed. Teyla watched him suddenly freeze and she felt goose bumps break out over her skin. John spun back to the window and stared out into the dark night.

“Is something wrong?” Teyla asked. She slipped out of her bed and joined him at the window.

John paused for a moment then shook his head. “Felt like someone was watching but…” He gestured at the empty street below. “I don’t know…probably nothing.”

Teyla looked down at the dark and quiet village. The street was empty of people. She took a deep breath, willing her heart to stop its sudden pounding.

“Never mind, Teyla. It’s nothing,” John said. He turned away from the window and crawled back into bed. Teyla glanced one last time outside, then made her way back to her own bed. She lay there for awhile, staring at the still shadows on the ceiling over her head until she heard John’s breathing even out into sleep, and only then did she allow herself to give in to the pull of fatigue.

ooooooooooooooooooooo

The next morning, Teyla and John stood in front of the tavern. The ground was wet with dew, but the clouds had cleared out, and it looked like it was going to be another warm day.

John hoped their search of the village was a little more productive than the “information” they’d gotten in the tavern that morning. The villagers had seemed friendly and more than willing to talk, but he wasn’t sure how many more stories he could take. No one they’d talked to had apparently ever actually seen one of these Kankardesh or Wraith or whatever they were for themselves, making John wonder just how much help the villagers were going to be.

But that’s how myths and legends started. One encounter with a Wraith could generate years of stories and rumors.

Despite the early morning hour, the sun was starting to beat down now, and John wiped his forehead with his sleeve. Teyla had wandered over to a fruit stall and was either bargaining for something that looked like a large green apple or trying to get information. John settled on the former, and smiled in satisfaction when Teyla started picking up each piece to test their ripeness.

“You’re the stranger asking questions about the ruins,” a woman’s voice spoke behind him.

John turned around to see a young woman with thick, dark hair curled around her shoulders standing in the door of a small shed. It was the same woman he’d caught staring at him in the tavern the night before. She had a handful of fabric in her arms, and when she smiled, her brown eyes twinkled. There was something shy but playful about her, and John found himself smiling back.

“Uh, yes, I was,” he said, feeling a little tongue tied. He pointed his thumb over his shoulder at Teyla. “We were…are…We are asking questions.”

The girl smiled again and turned away, disappearing into the dark room behind her. John cringed at the sudden sensation that he was sixteen again and wanting to ask the popular girl to the prom. He walked up to the door, peering in cautiously.

The woman had dropped her pile of fabric—clothes, John now saw—into a large tub of steaming water and was busy submerging it with a long wooden pole. _It looks like something out of a Jane Austen movie,_ he thought, then cringed that he would recognize anything from a Jane Austen movie.

Other than the woman, there was no one else in the small shed, but John stayed in the doorway, keeping a careful eye on the street. “Do you know anything about the ruins?”

“Oh, just the usual,” the woman answered. She set the pole aside and reached for a large box on the shelf above her. “You got quite the show in the tavern last night, so I’m sure you’d prefer it if I didn’t repeat any more stories of strange, blood-sucking creatures.” Her fingers brushed the bottom of the box as she tried to reach it.

“I think I’ve heard plenty of stories for one day,” John admitted. “Here, let me help you with that.” He stepped forward, easily wrapping his hands around the box and bringing it down. It was more heavy than he expected.

“Um…,” he stuttered. The woman had not moved out of the way when he’d grabbed the box, and he now found himself standing uncomfortably close to her. She smelled of flowers and cedar wood. John forced himself to step back from her. “Where do you want this?”

The woman smiled again, and John decided she was definitely much more playful than she was shy. She pointed to a small table next to the tub, and he set it down as quickly as he could.

“Thank you,” she said. “My name is Maya, by the way.”

“Colonel…uh…John. You can call me John.”

“John.” She opened the box and scooped out some powder, and the flowery smell intensified. “I’ve been to the ruins before,” she said casually. “When I was younger. All those stories about blood-sucking creatures, I think, are more to keep the children away.”

“Really?” John asked, thinking they might find the help they need after all. At Maya’s nod, John continued. “We’re actually explorers. My friend is interested in studying the ruins a little closer but they’re pretty big. We don’t really know the lay-out.”

“The ruins are huge. One could easily get lost down there,” Maya said. She poured the powder into the hot water, where it dissolved instantly. The flowery scent permeated the room.

“We’re hoping to find someone willing to show us around down there.”

Maya stepped forward suddenly, reaching out and grabbing John’s arm. “The ruins can be dangerous.”

“Uh, that’s okay.” John stepped back, attempting to extricate himself from Maya’s grasp and a little unsettled by her sudden intensity. She followed him, stepping closer and grabbing his other arm.

“I could help you,” she whispered, and John had the inkling that the help she was offering was not necessarily the kind of help he had in mind. He reached for her arms and tried to push her back as gently as he could.

“Ah, look. I’m sorry. I think maybe I’ve given you the wrong impression here. I’m really just interested in—”

Maya stepped forward again until John’s back was almost against the wall. He sighed deeply, once again smelling cedar wood and flowers on her hair, before he pushed her away with as much force as he dared use.

“Maya? Are you in here?” A rough voice yelled from just outside. Maya leapt backward, but not before the door swung open and the tall, rough-looking man that had been with her in the tavern the night before stepped inside. He looked between John and Maya for a split second, and then his face creased into a frown.

“What is going on here?” he yelled, his neck flushing red with anger.

“It is not what you think, Izyan,” Maya answered. “He is an explorer, curious about the ruins. He was merely asking for help in searching the place.”

“He was standing pretty close for someone who was _merely_ asking for help,” Izyan sneered.

“I know what this probably looks like, but nothing happened,” John said, grimacing even as he said it. He cringed as Izyan’s eyes narrowed and the man took a threatening step toward John.

“Sheppard, you okay?” Ronon’s voice floated into the tense room, and John breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of the runner just outside the doorway.

“I was just leaving here,” John answered Ronon but he looked forcibly at Izyan. The man glared back at John, then slowly stepped away from the door. John slipped past him without a word and made his way back to the front of the tavern. Ronon followed him quietly, but when John turned toward his friend, he saw that the runner was smirking at him.

“What?” he snapped.

Ronon shrugged, biting into a piece of fruit.

“I was just…asking her questions about the ruins and possibly getting some help,” John clarified, feeling his cheeks grow hot.

Ronon only smiled wider. John glanced back at Maya’s shed in time to see Izyan glare at John before making a some type of gesture with his hand and storming off in the other direction. John had never seen that particular gesture, but he could guess what it meant.

He leaned closer to Ronon, feeling the need to explain himself. “Look, I was just talking to her and then she tried to make a move on me.”

Ronon raised his eyebrow at that and glanced back toward the shed.

“Not a word of this to McKay,” John murmured. A few seconds later, they joined the scientist in question and Teyla. He smiled as Teyla handed him one of the apple-like fruits she’d gotten from the street vendor.

“I’d say this whole canvass-the-town plan is going to be a monstrous waste of time, but that would be pessimistic of me,” McKay said between bites of his own piece of fruit. “I really don’t think I can bear to hear another story like the one we got last night…Hey, some woman is waving at us.”

John glanced back to see Maya leaning in the doorframe of her shed, the coy smile back in place.

“She’s kind of hot, actually,” McKay continued.

“She’s not waving at us. Can we get to work now?” He waited for McKay to snap back at him, but the man’s focus would not be averted.

“No, I’m pretty sure she is. Do you think she wants to tell us something?”

“Not ‘us,’” Ronon said, then stared pointedly at John.

McKay glanced at Ronon, then John, then back to the woman in the door. John cringed when he saw the scientist’s eyes suddenly lit up in understanding. “You were Kirking her!”

“I was not Kirking her, Rodney.”

“You were! She’s waving at _you._ You were totally flirting with her. What is it with you and alien women? We can’t take you anywhere. You’ve been out here on your own for what? Five minutes? Unbelievable…”

“McKay,” John warned. “Drop it. You and Ronon head that way, see if you can round up some locals to help us out. Teyla, you’re with me.”

The others nodded, and John pushed past his teammates to begin the search. Teyla quickly fell into step beside him. As Ronon and McKay walked off in the opposite direction, he could hear the scientist pumping Ronon for as much information on the woman as he could. He grimaced, shaking his head.

 _This was going to be a long day._

* * *

 _Chapter 2_

“Well, to paraphrase McKay, this has been a giant waste of time,” Sheppard said. He wiped the beads of sweat building on his forehead. The day had turned stifling hot, despite the clouds building in the sky.

“I wonder if Ronon and Rodney are having more luck,” Teyla asked, looking as hot and tired as John.

Sheppard keyed his radio. “Ronon, McKay—come in.”

Within seconds, McKay answered, and John could tell instantly from the tone of his voice that the man was not having much fun.

“McKay here. Do you seriously want us to talk to every single person in this entire village? Because so far everyone has either run screaming when we’ve asked them to go into the ruins or laughed hysterically as they slam their door in our faces.”

“So, no luck?”

“Astute assessment, Sheppard. Thank you.”

“I don’t think we’re going to find anyone to help us,” Ronon’s voice broke in.

Sheppard took a deep breath, knowing McKay and Ronon both were hoping he’d call off the search of the village but neither willing to ask for it. He was tempted to let them off the hook—the likelihood of finding any help in the village was looking slim.

“Keep asking,” he responded instead. “Teyla and I have almost hit the edge of the town here. We’ll head over to the ruins as soon as we’re done, and then you two can join us. Sheppard out.”

He half expected McKay to complain, but the radio was silent. He and Teyla again began making their way down the street. They only had a couple more places to hit. As they approached the next house, the door opened and Maya stepped out, her arms loaded with a new basket of laundry. John felt his stomach clench, but he shook it off. _Nothing happened. It was just a misunderstanding._

“Maya,” he greeted. The woman looked up at him in surprise, then frowned. John swallowed his discomfort and pressed forward. “I’m sorry about earlier…”

Maya turned her head, refusing to meet his eye. She brushed past them without a word, and John ignored the flowery scent that lingered around her.

“Was that the woman from this morning?” Teyla asked.

“That was her,” he sighed. He glanced back but Maya was walking fast back toward the village. “Come on. Let’s finish this up.”

ooooooooooooooooo

Rodney McKay eyed the house sitting at the end of the road with trepidation. The yard was overgrown, and the wood paneling rotting and falling off in places. The windows weren’t boarded over, so it wasn’t a complete cliché in his mind, but the sense of desertion pervaded. He sniffed the air, convinced he could smell something dead.

Ronon paused, staring at the empty house for a moment before pushing past Rodney and walking down the path. Rodney groaned and ran to catch up with him.

“I don’t think anyone lives here,” he said to Ronon’s back, then cursed as he tripped on a branch lying half-strewn across the path. Ronon continued to walk forward, climbing the porch stairs and knocking with force. The sound reverberated around the quiet yard.

“Seriously, we’re trying to find people to help us and there are no people here.” McKay paused waiting for Ronon to acknowledge the logic of his statement. “This is a waste of time,” he added when Ronon continued to wait for someone to open the door.

He had just turned around to walk away when the runner grabbed the handle of the door and shook it. He spun in horror, knowing what the man was about to do. Sure enough, Ronon had forced the door open within seconds and was peering into the house.

“Ronon! What are you doing?” McKay had almost screamed, then remembered at the last minute that they were sneaking into a deserted house and forced himself to whisper. Not wanting to be left alone on the porch, he followed his teammate inside.

A large staircase immediately in front of the door was the first thing he noticed. Rooms opened up on each side and ran almost the entire depth of the house. Ronon headed to the right, holding his weapon loosely in his hand.

“Are you sure we should be doing this? I mean, these people probably have rules about breaking and entering.”

Ronon looked over at him. “Shhh!”

“Oh, that’s articulate,” Rodney whispered. “I’m just saying I really don’t want to spend the night in jail. I bet the jails here are filthy—filled with rats and mold. I’m allergic to mold. And dust. I hate dust. There all kinds of nasty things living in dust—”

Ronon glared at him and Rodney clamped his mouth shut. He was not in the mood to be slapped upside the head by the bigger man today. Instead, he glanced around the room. It was mostly bare—a few old tables and chairs set sporadically through the room, some covered in protective sheets.

Dust blanketed the room, inches thick in some corners. Rodney could see it dancing in the air in front of the few streams of light pouring through gaps in the curtain-covered windows. It was making his eyes water. His nose was beginning to itch as well, and he could feel a sneeze coming on. He slapped a hand over his nose and stared up at the ceiling with eyes closed.

“What are you doing, McKay?”

“Trying not to sneeze,” Rodney mumbled. When he felt like he had the urge to sneeze under control, he opened his head and looked around again. The dust was still swirling around him.

He snapped his head around at the sound of a sudden creaking in the house. Ronon, too, was looking around, searching for the source of the sound. It hadn’t sounded like footsteps, but still—they were intruding on private property here.

“What was that?” Rodney whispered when he could bare it no longer. “Is there someone else in here? Do you think they know we’re here?”

Ronon dragged him over to the side of the room and signaled him to be quiet. Rodney nodded. Quiet—he could do quiet. They waited a moment for any other sound, but the house was deathly still.

Ronon set his hand on Rodney chest telling him with a look not to move, and then the runner was moving through the rest of the house. He moved so fast and so quietly, that Rodney hardly had the chance to react to his disappearance before the runner swept through the entire ground floor and returned.

He signaled that he was going upstairs, and Rodney moved to follow him, but he’d only made it to about the fourth stair before Ronon was heading back down.

The runner leaned in close and whispered in Rodney’s ear. “Don’t think anyone’s here?”

“Then why are you whispering?” Rodney answered, matching his teammate’s volume.

“Follow me.”

Rodney crept after Ronon, and the two of them made their way to the back part of the house. Ronon pointed toward a door, then took up a position on one side and signaled Rodney to open it.

 _Oh, I hate this part,_ he thought but didn’t dare say it out loud. He leaned over, grabbing the handle and waiting for Ronon’s signal. At the runner’s nod, he flung the door open.

ooooooooooooooooo

The village had been a bust. Not that John’s expectations were too high, but he thought they would have at least been able to round up a couple of people to help them. The villagers regaled them with stories of blood-sucking creatures and certain death, but no one would go near the ruins. By the time he and Teyla had hit those last two houses, he’d thought he was going to lose his mind.

That had been over an hour ago. He and Teyla had reached the small clearing and the entrance to the ruins quickly, but sweat was soaking into his t-shirt. The woods around the village were thick—almost tropical—and the air was heavy with humidity.

The entry hallway into the ruins was at least thirty feet deep and about ten feet wide. There were a half dozen little alcoves off to the sides—nothing bigger than closets. They had checked them all the day before and found the place completely empty. The stone walls were thick and wet and covered in moss, but the air was cool and almost pleasant inside the ruins after the heat of the outdoors.

He and Teyla had delved deeper into the ruins today than they had the day before, looking down every dark hallway. The farther they went the more he noticed a faint musty odor, smelling vaguely of something old and rotting. It was impossible to tell what the ruins had once been. A series of buildings? One large structure? Its ancient purpose was equally obtuse. Room after empty room of bare stone walls revealed nothing.

He kicked the wall in frustration then hopped in place for a second at the flare of pain in his big toe.

“John?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he muttered. He set his foot back on the ground gingerly and walked around the small room they were investigating until the throbbing eased. He looked up at Teyla, who was running her fingers along the bare wall.

“You got something?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” Teyla answered, her fingers continuing to run over the cracks and rivets in the stones. “It looks like there were carvings in these walls once. I can make out figures, possibly an animal of some kind…”

“The Kankardesh?” John asked, unable to keep the smile off his face. He could almost feel the glare Teyla was shooting at him in the dark hallway. He walked over to her, lighting up the area she was studying with his flashlight.

“I cannot say,” Teyla said, as diplomatic as ever. “The carvings are old; some parts have faded away completely.”

Sure enough, faint grooves in the stones were just visible, and he was impressed she had noticed them at all in the first place. He watched her as she traced one of the figures with her finger and nodded. It did look like some kind of figure, but it was too faded to see clearly what was once depicted—at least not immediately.

“We could spend months exploring this place and never find what we’re looking for.”

“I agree. I do not think we will find anything this way,” Teyla said.

John sat down on a nearby stone and checked his watch. Ronon and McKay should have joined them by now, or at least contacted him to let him know they were on their way. “Where the hell are Ronon and McKay?”

Teyla shrugged and keyed her radio. “Ronon? Rodney? Do you read?”

John felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up at the silence that followed. He shivered at the sudden sense of unease and glanced down the hallway, but it disappeared into inky blackness in both directions.

“McKay, Ronon—this is Sheppard. Come in,” he called out, ignoring the flutter of fear in the pit of his stomach.

At the continued silence, the two of them immediately turned back the way they’d come.

“These walls are thick. Perhaps they are blocking our radio signals,” Teyla said.

“Maybe,” he said. Using the flashlights on their P90s, they scanned every shadow as they walked, hoping for the one clue that could unravel the mystery of what this place was. Some of the hallways had had very Ancient-like wall sconces that lit up when John approached them, but none of the lights worked in this hallway, and John wondered if McKay’s intermittent energy signal was actually caused by a dying and almost-dead power source.

“It does not look like anyone has been down here in a very long time,” Teyla said after awhile.

John stopped, pinching the bridge of his nose at the sudden tension headache.

“Are you alright?” Teyla asked, noticing his discomfort.

“I’ve just made an executive decision—there’s nothing here to find. Let’s grab Ronon and McKay and gate home.”

“Rodney will not be happy about that,” Teyla said as she glanced around the hallway.

John shrugged. “I don’t imagine he will be, but I’m tired and my head hurts, and this place has been empty for so long I really don’t think we’ll find anything in here worth the effort.”

ooooooooooooooooo

The open door revealed another set of stairs heading down into a basement. Rodney relaxed a little when neither a screaming monster or a villager brandishing a knife or gun came flying out at them. The stairs were dark and decidedly rickety looking, and he let Ronon walk down first. He pulled his own weapon, holding it tightly with both hands.

The basement was pitch black. By the time they moved away from the light spilling in from above, he couldn’t even see Ronon’s back a few feet in front of him. _Don’t shoot Ronon, don’t shoot Ronon,_ he chanted to himself. His hands were beginning to shake, and his ears strained to hear the first sign that they weren’t alone.

 _Flashlight! I have a flashlight!_ He scrambled for the pocket in his vest where he kept his flashlight. He turned it on, then squinted when Ronon flashed his own light in Rodney’s eyes at the same time.

“Ow!” he said, turning his head and trying to blink away the afterimage.

“Sorry,” Ronon said, and Rodney could tell without looking at him that he was smiling.

They flashed their light around the room. It was large and sparsely furnished, but definitely not abandoned like the rest of the house. The small windows near the ceiling were covered in heavy red drapes and the walls covered in murals. He scanned the room with his light, zeroing in on a small gray box built into the wall—light switch.

He flipped the light on, and a low level bulb flickered to life above him. He smiled in satisfaction when Ronon jerked in surprise at the sudden visibility. The light wasn’t very bright, but it illuminated the entire room.

His smile fell as he looked around the basement, and his gut began churning with a combination of fear and disgust. The murals on the walls looked like old tapestries and paintings from the middle ages. He focused on the wall in front of him. It showed a man being ripped limb from limb by a mass of people wearing gray robes. Some of the people were kneeling, watching the spectacle in complete awe and possibly adoration. Other people were catching the dead man’s blood in cups and drinking it; some were even feasting on the actual flesh.

“McKay,” Ronon said, his voice tight and dark and dangerous.

“What?” Rodney asked, but he could barely get the word out.

Ronon stood in front of another wall, his eyes riveted. The picture he was looking at was similar, but this one showed half a dozen people being held down—their mouths opened in silent screams—while the robed figures stabbed them alive. Rodney closed his eyes, staring down at his feet. It was the only safe place to look.

The floor was carpeted—a thick, deep red rug the color of blood. It was clean, too. Not a speck of dust compared to the rest of the house. He wandered over to a table framed in drapes and pulled one of them back.

“Aaaarggghhhhh!” he cried out, backpedaling so fast he tripped and landed hard on his back. He held his gun up, his arm trembling. Ronon had spun around at Rodney’s cry and now advanced cautiously toward the table. He peeled open the drapes as Rodney climbed back to his feet.

“What the hell?” he said.

The curtains hid a skeleton strung up to the wall—its arms spread out, its jaw hanging open. Rodney stepped up next to Ronon and looked down at the table—gold cups and plates, some candles, a gold-hilted knife leaning against a wooden stand. He reached out a hand to finger some of the items, but couldn’t bring himself to touch anything.

Ronon moved away, and Rodney watched the runner studying the other wall paintings. He looked back at the table and noticed it was covered in a deep red table runner. The skeleton stared back at him, the gaping black holes of its eye sockets burning into him.

“An altar,” he said suddenly. “This is an altar.”

“Wraith,” Ronon hissed.

Rodney jerked around, settling on Ronon’s tense figure standing in front of a smaller mural in the corner of the room. This picture again depicted the kneeling figures, but instead of a dead body, a Wraith—larger than life—stood in the center of them. The figures closest to the Wraith reached out to him, grabbing onto the black leather cloak the Wraith usually wore.

“They were Wraith worshippers,” Rodney said.

“Not _were._ Are. They are Wraith worshippers.” Ronon turned to look at him. “This room is clean, which means it’s been used recently.”

“This is…sick. I think I’m going to be sick,” Rodney muttered. He swallowed against a suddenly dry mouth, feeling his heart beginning to flutter in panic.

Ronon grabbed his arm, steering him back toward the stairs. “We need get out of here, McKay. We need to warn Sheppard and Teyla.”

Rodney nodded, reaching for him radio. “Sheppard, Teyla?”

Ronon had begun to climb the stairs, but he paused, waiting for a response.

“Colonel Sheppard, come in?”

Rodney looked at Ronon, shrugging. Ronon grabbed his own radio and called out to their two teammates, but also received no response.

“This is not good.”

Ronon nodded, but before either of them could do anything else, the house creaked ominously.

“Do you think—” Rodney started to ask, but Ronon had already darted down the stairs and grabbed the scientist’s arm, shushing him as they moved. Above them, footsteps pounded on the porch, and then the room was plunged into darkness.

ooooooooooooooooo

John keyed his radio. “This is Sheppard. Does anyone read?”

The radio answered him again with nothing more than static. He glanced in concern at Teyla as the two continued to hurry down the hallway. They’d explored pretty far into the ruins—farther than John had intended—but he hoped that as they got closer to the entrance, they’d be able to get a hold of Ronon and McKay.

 _Assuming the problem is with the radios,_ he thought. He swallowed back the unease that had taken up residence in his gut. As they rounded the corner and headed down another long corridor, the smell of mold was almost overwhelming and John tried to breathe solely through his mouth.

“I don’t remember it smelling this bad before. Are you sure we’re going the right way?”

“I am positive,” Teyla answered, and they kept moving. John trusted Teyla’s sense of direction and he let her lead the way.

She was a few feet in front of him and moving quickly, so she missed the stone slab sliding away to reveal a door off to the side. John caught the slight movement out of the corner of his eye, and in the darkness almost didn’t realize what he was seeing. A door had appeared in the corridor where there had been none before. He stopped in front of it, peering inside. It looked like all the other small, empty rooms they’d explored.

“Hey, Teyla, hold up,” he called out to her as he stepped cautiously into the room. “I don’t think this door was here before.” He could hear Teyla’s footsteps behind him as she turned back and came toward the room.

The sound of stone sliding against stone hissed behind him, and he felt his stomach drop. He spun around just as a stone slab dropped down from above the doorframe to seal him in.

“Teyla!” John yelled. He jumped forward, banging his fists into the stone wall. The door looked like a solid wall now and had to be at least a foot thick. “Teyla?”

She didn’t respond, not that he expected her to be able to hear him through the rock. He grabbed at his radio, calling out again, but again, no response.

“Damn it, John,” he growled. He stepped back into the center of the room, turning on his flashlight. The room was empty, like every other room they’d looked at. He shined his light on the wall where the doorway should have been, looking for anything that might open it back up.

He heard the creaking sound a split second before he identified it as coming from below him, and had just enough time to look down at his feet before he dropped through the ceiling and plunged into a dark abyss.

* * *

 _Chapter 3_

“McKay, come on!”

Ronon moved away from the light switch and grabbed the scientist by the jacket. He could hear the front door swinging open above him and the low murmur of voices as people entered the house.

He pulled his teammate around the staircase. The basement consisted of two rooms: the larger room with the altar and Wraith worshipping murals, and a smaller room on the other end of the house, the door closed. He could hear McKay’s heavy breathing as he rattled the door handle.

Locked. Ronon turned the handle as far as it could go, hoping to bend the metal inside the lock. The creaking echoed above them as a group of villagers moved through the front room. They were headed toward the back of the house, no doubt planning on coming down to the basement. The basement was the only room in the house that appeared to be used at all.

The handle snapped in his hand, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He could shoot his way out of the basement if worse came to worse, but he wasn’t exactly on high ground and he had no idea how many people were above him. It would be far too easy to get trapped down here—better to hide and hope the villagers didn’t linger long.

He pulled the door to the small room open and shoved McKay inside. The room looked more like a closet, filled with boxes and three rows of tightly packed gray robes.

“Hey, Eijaz, did you leave the door open again?” A man’s voice called out.

McKay was trying to push his way through the robes, but there was not enough room to squeeze through. Ronon pushed down on his shoulder, and McKay instantly dropped to crawl along the floor.

“Shut it, Nihal,” another man growled back, and Ronon could hear footsteps walking toward the basement staircase. He slid inside the closet and shut the door as quietly as he possibly could, grateful that he’d thought of turning the lights off right away. Lights would have been a dead giveaway that someone had found their altar room.

He dropped to his knees just as heavy footsteps banged against the stairs. From the sound of it, there were three people coming down—two men at least. The third set of footsteps was lighter. _Either a smaller man or a woman,_ Ronon conjectured.

He began scooting toward the back of the closet, mindful of the boxes littering the floor. Any noise at this point could be deadly. McKay had stopped moving—Ronon could hardly hear him. He smiled, feeling a sudden sense of pride in the scientist. He’d come a long way since Ronon had first met him.

Through a crack in the door, Ronon saw the light in the larger room flip on. He could hear the rustling of fabric as people moved around. He reached his hand back, attempting to push a little deeper into the closet and brushed his hand against McKay’s boot. A hand on his arm helped guide him back until he was leaning against the wall next to his teammate. The two of them sat absolutely still, three rows of robes and a scattering of boxes their only cover.

“Smells odd down here,” the man named Eijaz said. His voice was a little muffled but the words still clearly understandable.

“Never mind that,” a woman said. “The queen has asked us to prepare for a new sacrifice. The innocent has already been selected.”

“She has him already?”

“I did not question her, Nihal. Gather the robes. Eijaz, help him—we’ll need at least two dozen.”

He could feel McKay shoot a panicked glance at him and he set his hand on the man’s arm, hoping to calm him. The front row of robes held at least two dozen, so the villagers wouldn’t need to dig too deeply into the closet. He raised his gun just in case.

The door opened, and more light spilled into the room. Ronon glanced at McKay and saw beads of sweat had broken out across his forehead. He was staring straight ahead, his eyes unblinking and his mouth slightly ajar. Ronon nudged him showing him his gun and hoping the scientist would stay calm. McKay nodded.

“Two dozen—that’s a small gathering,” Eijaz whispered. Hangers slid against the wooden bar holding up the robes as the man began pulling them down.

“It is,” Nihal agreed, also in a whisper and obviously trying to keep their conversation too low for the woman to hear. “Do you think it is one of those newcomers? The ones asking all the questions about the ruins?”

“That is my guest. I was told the queen has been watching their movements since they arrived.”

“Do you think they will uncover the secret of the ruins?”

“Not before the queen has gotten what she needs of them.”

“I need a box to carry the chalice and dagger,” the woman yelled, interrupting them.

“Yes, Leem,” Eijaz answered. He grabbed a box near the door, dumping its contents into a corner, and then the closet was plunged again into darkness when the man slammed the door shut.

“Ah, the door is broken,” he muttered when the lock didn’t click shut. “Decrepit old house…”

Ronon leaned forward as the three people moved through the room and made their way up the stairs. The basement was dark again, the light turned off.

“Be sure to close the door this time, Eijaz,” Nihal ribbed as he reached the top of the stairs. Ronon heard Eijaz muttering something back, but it was unintelligible. Ronon reached the door of the closet right as Eijaz, presumably, reached the top of the stairs and shut the door behind him.

He waited until the sounds of footsteps and creaking floorboards above him grew silent. He could just make out the sound of the front door being closed. Finally, he slid the closet door open an inch and peered into the dark room, waiting. Behind him, McKay crawled forward.

Ronon listened. The room was quiet, his senses telling him they were alone in the house again. He pushed the door open and stepped out into the dark basement, grabbing McKay’s arm and helping the man stand up.

“Stay behind me, don’t talk,” he whispered. He nodded to himself when the physicist had the sense to not answer him back. He felt a tap on his shoulder, letting him know McKay understood. He flipped his flashlight on, holding it away from his body in case anyone was waiting for them to give away their position and started shooting at the light.

Nothing happened.

He flashed it around the room, pausing on the altar table. The cup and knife were gone. He heard McKay breathing too heavily behind him, and they began creeping up the stairs. At the top, he paused again but the house was quiet. He opened the door, a little relieved to find it wasn’t locked, and slipped out into the hall.

The house looked exactly the way it had when they’d first entered. He kept his gun up just in case, but a quick check of the main floor told him what he already knew—the villagers were gone. He peeled back the curtain over one of the front windows. The street outside looked empty, but there could be plenty of people peeking through their own windows from the neighboring houses.

“Anyone out there?” McKay finally whispered.

Ronon shook his head. “Looks empty, but you never know.”

They stood in the living room of the abandoned house, staring at each other and replaying the conversation they’d overheard.

“The queen…do you think they meant a Wraith queen?”

Ronon shrugged. “Sounded like it. They are Wraith worshippers.” He saw the images on the walls again in his mind, and he was overcome with anger.

McKay seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “All those stories about blood-sucking creatures and drinkers of blood…they were talking about themselves.”

Ronon grimaced in disgust. McKay was right—the murals in the basement showed exactly that. He thought of Sheppard and Teyla suddenly, wandering through the ruins, and turned his radio back on. “Sheppard? Teyla?”

Again there was no answer. McKay picked up his radio and called out to them, but Ronon didn’t really expect to hear an answer. He glanced one last time out the front window at the empty street. The village looked deceptively peaceful, like any number of villages throughout the Pegasus galaxy.

He moved through the small house until he found a back door. It was boarded shut, but Ronon was able to open a nearby window. He slid through it then helped McKay out.

“We’ll go through the forest, work our way to the ruins without going through the village,” he said.

“Good idea.”

“Come on.” He dove into the woods and the cover of the trees, McKay right behind him, and wondered if they’d reach the other half of their team in time.

ooooooooooooooo

John came to suddenly, coughing on the dust that had been kicked up by the ceiling breaking. His entire body throbbed. He squeezed his eyes closed and rolled to his side, curling into himself and wrapping his arms around his ribs as he tried to breathe. He’d had the wind knocked out of him before, but never like this. The cold stone floor seeped through his T-shirt and vest, making him shiver.

He lay there for a few minutes, trying to take stock of himself. He’d hit the ground hard, but he didn’t think he’d been unconscious for more than a few seconds. His head ached, though, and he kept his eyes shut as he reached for his radio. The earpiece was gone—buried somewhere in the debris of the ceiling—but the actual box was still attached to his vest.

“Teyla?” he wheezed out.

The radio was silent. The room was much colder than the hallways he’d been exploring earlier, and the rotting, musty smell was much stronger—almost overwhelming. Bits of dust settled on his face, making his skin itch. John coughed again, grateful when his lungs expanded fully. The throbbing was beginning to ease a little as well. He lay there taking stock of himself and thought that he’d somehow managed to avoid cracking a rib. He rubbed a hand over his face, wiping away the dust, and finally opened his eyes to look around the room.

“Holy Sssshhh…” he gasped, coming face-to-face with a dead body. Its mouth was stretched open in an endless silent scream, its skin pulled tight against the bones of its face and starting to peel off in sections. John sat up and tried to shuffle backward, but choked on a scream when his hand broke through a brittle, crusted surface and sunk into something soft and wet.

He looked down to see his hand disappearing beneath dry, gray flesh and into the softer remains of someone’s half-decomposed stomach. He jerked away, feeling bile shoot up his throat, and slid as far away from the bodies as he could.

He hit a wall and leaned into it, closing his eyes and trying desperately to get his stomach under control. He brought his hands up to cover his face and was instantly assaulted with the stench of rotting flesh. His hand was sticky.

He wiped it frantically on his vest but couldn’t stop himself from gagging. That was just the signal his stomach needed: he leaned over, heaving every last bit of food he’d eaten in the last day. When his stomach finally settled, he sagged into the wall in exhaustion. He could feel himself shaking, and he told himself it was from being sick, nothing else.

John kept his eyes closed and took a few deep breaths through his mouth. The smell was overpowering now that he knew what it was. He could taste sour vomit on his tongue, and he took a swig from his canteen, swishing the water around in his mouth and spitting it out. He was careful not to swallow any, though, not sure how his stomach would react.

 _Open your eyes,_ John, he told himself. He tried to be stern, but a part of him was pleading to never open his eyes again—never have to see what he knew was in the room with him. _You have to do it, buddy. You have to open your eyes and deal with it at some point._

With what felt like a monumental effort, John forced himself to open his eyes and look around. A soft blue light on the wall emanating from Atlantean wall sconces illuminated most of the room.

“Of course these lights work,” he muttered. The ceiling overhead was wood, not stone, with a jagged hole where John had fallen through at its center. He forced his head down and scanned the ground.

Bodies. There were five or six of them, all in varying stages of decomposition. They were stacked in the center of the room, one on top of the other, and John had landed on them all.

He stared at their faces. Their eyes were open wide in terror, their upper bodies bare-chested but clean. There were no gaping wounds over their hearts like he’d expect to find after a Wraith feeding. The cold air in the room made him shiver harder, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away now that he had finally gotten himself to look.

Their skin looked tough, leathery almost, and he was reminded of pictures he’d seen of Egyptian mummies. It was like they’d been completely drained of fluids. He glanced down at his sticky hand—well, not completely drained. He gagged, but grit his teeth and managed to keep his stomach from revolting again.

Drained of blood. He flashed to the old man in the tavern, telling the story of the Kankardesh—the drinkers of blood. He’d assumed the man was talking about the Wraith, but there were no Wraith feeding marks on these bodies. Something else was going on.

John pushed against the wall to stand up, but as he took a step, his right leg gave out underneath him and he screamed out in pain. He slid back down to the ground, grabbing at his ankle. Pain stabbed through his leg, and he bit his lip.

“Way to go, John,” he muttered. In the shock of finding himself among a pile of bodies, he hadn’t noticed the throbbing in his ankle. He could feel it now, though, swelling up in his boot and pressing against the stiff leather sides. It was a bad sprain—he could tell that already.

A minute later, he’d managed to pull himself up to a standing position, and he leaned against the wall as he hobbled toward the door. He reached for his radio again and half-heartedly called out to his team, but he didn’t wait long for a response. He hadn’t expected any, really.

The door led out into a dark hallway that lit up when he approached. Definitely Ancient, although not all the light bulbs were functioning. His ankle shrieked its agony with every step, but he forced himself to move forward, away from the dead.

ooooooooooooooo

Rodney McKay was not a runner, no matter how hard Ronon tried to make him into one. The muscles in his legs burned, his knees were throbbing, he had shooting pains going through his lower back, and he was pretty sure one of his toes had turned into a massive blister.

Ronon gave no sign of letting up or slowing down. The deserted house had been on the far side of the village, and their detour through the woods made the distance to the ruins that much farther. Rodney’s head jarred with each pounding step. It felt like his insides were detaching from his rib cage, causing untold damage and internal bleeding.

“Wait…Ronon…” he gasped out. “Need a breather…”

He knew the urgency of the situation, knew they had to reach Teyla and Sheppard before the villagers, but his body had physical limits, and he had just about reached his. His chest was heaving as he gulped in too little air and his head felt swollen.

And to think people actually ran for fun.

He stumbled then, crying out. His momentum propelled him forward and his arms flailed as he tried to keep his feet under him. He managed to grab onto a tree and hold on, mildly surprised he wasn’t face down in the dirt.

Ronon must have stopped at this cry, because when he looked up, he saw the runner coming back toward him.

“McKay! We don’t have time. You have to run.”

“Can’t breathe…just a minute…going to pass out…”

He really was going to pass out. Ronon’s figure swayed in front of him. He felt a hand on his arm and a sharp tug away from the tree.

“McKay.”

Rodney groaned, blinking sweat out of his eyes. The muscles in his arms and legs were trembling in exhaustion. The logical part of his brain catalogued the information away, thinking he would have to ask Ronon or Sheppard how his arms could be tired when it was his legs doing all the work.

Sheppard.

He pushed up and away from the tree, taking a faltering step. They had to get to Sheppard and Teyla. Ronon’s grip was still strong on his arm, but the man had stopped pulling on him. He seemed to realize Rodney was going as fast as he could. They took a few more steps, and then Ronon prodded him into a slow jog.

 _I can’t do this,_ Rodney thought. His legs had cramped up as soon as he’d started moving again. He was about to beg Ronon to leave him behind when suddenly the runner stopped. Rodney looked up in surprise, seeing nothing but thick green vegetation all around them, but Ronon was tense next to him.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Ronon paused for a moment, tilting his head as he listened to sounds Rodney could not hear. Abruptly, he pushed them both off the path until they were squatting behind a large boulder a good ten feet off from where they’d been running.

“Someone’s coming,” Ronon finally answered. He pulled out his gun and looked back toward the path.

Rodney collapsed against the boulder, using the time to catch his breath and rest his aching legs. He could hardly get enough air into his lungs, and he could feel his heart trying to pound its way out of his chest. He raised one shaky arm to wipe the sweat off his flushed face.

“Shhh,” Ronon hissed at him.

“What?”

“Stop breathing so loud.”

“I can’t stop breathing. I’m barely breathing now,” Rodney hissed back. He would have said more, but at that moment, a twig snapped close by. They both froze. Rodney stared at his empty hands and wondered if he could reach his gun without making any noise.

“Ronon? Rodney?”

Teyla’s voice echoed in the woods around them, and Rodney melted with relief, sagging into the rock. They’d found them—they were safe.

Ronon stood up, the tension in his body uncoiling. Rodney watched the man stand up and holster his gun, shaking out his arms and legs.

“Where’s Sheppard?”

At the question, Rodney looked up. He felt his gut twist in apprehension and he pushed himself to his feet. Teyla stood alone on the path, her face smeared with dirt and sweat. The muscles around her forehead pulled down around eyes full of worry.

“In the ruins. Something has happened.”

“I’ll say,” Rodney muttered.

Teyla ignored him. “We were exploring some of the hallways. When we were unable to reach you on the radio, we decided to head back.” Teyla took a deep breath.

“What happened, Teyla?” Ronon asked, and Rodney was almost startled at the gentleness in the man’s voice.

“I was ahead of him. He stopped to look into a room we had passed, but when I turned around to join him, a stone door immediately dropped, sealing him inside.”

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. I could not get through to him or you on the radio.” The concern in her voice was bordering on panic. She grabbed Ronon’s arm and began pulling him toward the path back to the village. “We need to go back to the village,” she said. “We need to get help.”

Ronon grabbed her arms, pulling her arms up short.

“We can’t do that,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Rodney glanced at Ronon and saw something dark and angry flash through the man’s eyes. His stomach was curling into itself and his heart was pounding again, but this time it had nothing to do with running. His mind flashed to the murals and the gruesome depictions of human sacrifice.

“We found something,” Rodney answered.

* * *

 _Chapter 4_

“HH-60G Pave Hawk.”

John’s voice echoed in the dank hallway. His flashlight bobbing along as he staggered down the corridor.

“Has retractable in-flight refueling probe, internal auxiliary fuel tanks…uh…two crew-served .50 caliber machine guns.”

He leaned against the wall as he walked, trying to take some of the weight off his sprained ankle. The pain in his ankle was throbbing and he could feel his toes tingling. He closed his eyes, taking another step and forcing himself to move forward.

“8,000 pound capacity cargo hook, folding rotor blades—”

He stumbled on loose rocks under his feet and grabbed desperately for the wall. He bit his lip to keep from crying out. He could feel bruises tightening across his back from where he’d fallen through the ceiling, but luckily they didn’t feel too serious—not as serious as his ankle at least.

He flashed his light down both directions of the hallway. The Ancient lights were intermittent—some of them worked, some of them didn’t. This particular corridor was pitch black. He could hear the steady drip of water hitting a puddle from somewhere up ahead, but otherwise it was silent.

John grabbed his radio. “Teyla? Ronon? McKay?” he called out.

They didn’t answer—no one had answered the last four times he’d tried to contact them—but he kept trying, kept talking. “Anyone read me?”

Another second of silence passed before John forced himself to start walking again. The wall he was leaning on was wet and slimy, and the air felt even chillier. For all he knew he was wandering deeper into the maze of corridors. Every fifteen feet or so, he’d come across a doorway, opening into a dark, empty room. Luckily, there’d been no more bodies so far.

 _Hug a tree._ The thought flashed through his mind. Should he stop and wait for rescue, hoping someone found him? Or should he keep going? He had no way of contacting anyone, no way of knowing which way he should go. He was a floor below the one he and Teyla had been on, but he was sure he was heading toward the entrance. There had to be a staircase somewhere around here.

“Pave Hawks come equipped with radar warning receivers, infrared jammers, and flare/chaff countermeasure dispensing systems,” John said, still speaking into the radio. He lifted his finger from the transmit button and listened for a response, hoping the signal would, by some miracle, get through.

“Rescue equipment includes…um…a hoist capable of lifting 600 pounds from a hover height of…uh…200 feet…”

His foot hit a patch of wet mold, sliding out from under him. Instinctively, he set his bad leg down to catch his balance. The ankle immediately twisted underneath him, and he fell in a heap on the ground. John moaned, curling up into a ball and grabbing a hold of his leg. He resisted the urge to rock in time with the throbbing agony, but he couldn’t hold back the moisture leaking through closed eyes squeezed too tight.

He breathed in as heavily as he could, smelling and tasting the wet, humid air. At least the rotting smell was gone. After a moment, he managed to push himself back toward the wall, but it took a little bit longer to get back to a sitting position.

“Rotor diameter is fifty…fifty-three feet, seven inches…ah shit,” John mumbled. He leaned his head against the wall, breathing heavily, and gingerly extended his leg. Even the slight pressure of the ground on his ankle sent pulses of pain all the way up to his thigh.

He grabbed his radio again. “Guys? If you can hear me, I fell through the floor. There’s a whole level below the ones we were initially exploring.”

He opened his eyes and glanced down the hallway, as black and empty as before. He flashed his light as his foot. The ankle was visibly swollen, even with the boot still on.

“Sprained my ankle pretty bad,” he continued. “Was heading…uh…West, back toward the entrance, but I think I need a break now…hug a tree and all that…”

He was starting to ramble. “Is anyone there?” he called out again. “I’ll just wait here…probably shouldn’t have wandered this far anyway in the first place but…uh…”

John shivered, seeing the bodies stacked up on each other. He could almost smell the rotting flesh, but knew that had to be in his mind. He should have stayed where he’d fallen—that was protocol and the smart thing to do—but no way was he staying with those bodies.

“Too late now,” he said. He waited for some kind of response on his radio, but the only thing he heard was static. He turned the volume down, not wanting to turn it off completely for fear of missing a call from his team but worrying about the batteries. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be down here long enough for the batteries to go dead.

John closed his eyes again. The pain in his ankle had ebbed a little now that he wasn’t trying to walk on it. _Things could be worse,_ he thought. He should wait for his team to find him. He shifted a little against the wall, trying to find a more comfortable place and shivered against the cool, damp air.

ooooooooooooooooo

“They are Wraith worshippers? You are sure of this?” Teyla asked, shocked. The three of them were making their way through the woods as quickly as they could, but their movements were careful. Every step, every snapping twig and rustle of cloth, had Teyla glancing around for fear that someone might hear them.

“I know what I saw,” Ronon said. “They were talking about a queen, too.”

The forest was hot—it felt like the humidity in the air had doubled and now it pressed down on them as they walked. Rodney was quiet, his face flushed with heat. He gave her a small smile when she handed him her water canteen, but she could read his fear in his quick, jerky movements.

Teyla glanced up at the sky, ignoring the dark clouds gathering overhead, and turned her attention inward. She didn’t understand how she sensed the Wraith, but she’d learned to recognize the feeling over the years. She focused now, searching for the tiniest sensation of cold adrenaline.

If the Wraith were here, she would feel them in her heart—something that had disturbed her since she was a little girl. Teyla had never understand how something so terrible would manifest itself in the center of her soul. She waited for the tiniest fluttering of the organ, a quickening of her pulse.

Nothing.

Her heart beat warm and steady within her. Beneath her anxiety over John, the icy grip of the Wraith’s presence was absent.

“I do not sense any Wraith here,” she finally said, opening her eyes. She felt more than saw Rodney breathe out a sigh of relief. She had stopped walking, and the others had waited for her.

“Good,” Rodney said. “That’s good.”

Teyla nodded, picking up the pace again. She led the way through the forest as quickly but quietly as she could. A few minutes later, the rounded the hill looking down onto the clearing in front of the entrance to the ruins. A small gathering of villagers was already assembled in front of the door.

Teyla dropped to the ground, hearing Ronon and Rodney grunt as they hit the dirt behind her. The villagers were relaxed, standing around the entrance and occasionally glancing toward the path that led to the village.

“Good thing we went the long way around the village,” Rodney whispered as he crawled up next to Teyla to look at the villagers. “We would have run right into that group.”

Ronon grunted in agreement. The three of them waited, but the villagers seemed to be in no hurry. Ronon and Rodney had explained what they’d found in the abandoned house, and the thought made her skin crawl.

“Do you think they have Sheppard?” Rodney asked.

“I don’t see him anywhere,” Ronon answered. “I don’t think so.”

Teyla nodded, needing to believe Ronon. In truth, they had no idea where Sheppard was—trapped in the ruins, injured, imprisoned in the village. Dead. She shook her head. She would not allow herself to think of that possibility. She reached for her radio, acutely aware of how close they were to the group of villagers.

“Colonel Sheppard, this is Teyla. Do you copy?”

All three of them waited, hardly daring to breathe. She tried again. “John, please answer. Can you hear me?”

Again, there was no response. Rodney pointed down toward the ruins.

“Those walls are pretty thick. He must be too deep for the radio signal to get through.”

“I hope you are right, Rodney,” Teyla said. But it didn’t feel right. Something had been wrong since the moment they’d stepped foot on this planet, and it wouldn’t be the first time they encountered a village or people that was much more than what they purported to be.

“Two more villagers just joined the group at the entrance—that’s fourteen total now.”

Teyla slid back, crawling away from the ruins. They needed to figure out a plan. The other two followed her, standing up when they were far enough away not to be heard.

“We need to find another way in,” she said.

“I can take them.”

“No, Ronon. There could be more people nearby, or inside the ruins themselves. We can’t risk them catching us.”

Ronon frowned, and Teyla sensed his impatience at being held back. She wanted to go after John just as much as he did, but they had to be smart about it.

“Hey,” Rodney said, interrupting her thoughts. He was sitting on a log, bending over his computer pad, an Ancient scanner in one hand. His gaze darted between the scanner and the computer screen.

“What, McKay?”

“I figured out why our radios aren’t working.” He glanced between her and Ronon. “I tweaked the scanner, looking for more Wraith-like signals…”

“And?” Teyla asked, but she was already dreading the answer.

“I’m getting a massive energy reading from the direction of the village. It’s emitting an EM pulse strong enough to disrupt any radio signals within a 50-mile radius.”

“Is it Wraith?”

“Not exactly. It’s similar though.” He glanced around the quiet forest. “Maybe they have some Wraith tech they’ve jerry-rigged.”

“How come you didn’t find this earlier?” Ronon asked. He sounded accusatory, but Teyla understood him well enough to know it was stress and fear for his friend.

“It wasn’t on earlier,” McKay snapped back.

Before Ronon could respond, they heard a distant voice calling out. “Hey-oh, we have the robes. Quickly!”

The voice came from the village path. Teyla crept back to her earlier position and saw four more villagers joining the group at the entrance. Two of them held armfuls of the gray robes Ronon and McKay had described earlier. She watched the men distribute the robes to the group.

“That sounds like one of the guys in the basement,” McKay said.

“Nihal, I think,” Ronon added.

The group donned the robes, pulling the hoods up over their faces. They each tied bright red sashes around their waists and then criss-crossed them over their shoulders. When everyone was dressed, they lined up in two rows, forming a path that led to the entrance of the ruins.

“She comes!” One of the villagers called out, and Teyla tensed. Beside her, she felt Ronon pulling out his blaster. She forced herself to take a deep breath. She still did not sense the Wraith’s presence.

Another figure stepped out of the forest and into the small clearing. The two lines of villagers visibly straightened. This figure was smaller, moving with delicate grace over the rough ground. She wore a gray cloak like the others and held out a long dagger in front of her. Two more figures in gray trailed behind her, matching her pace. Each of them carried a jewel-encrusted goblet in two hands, holding it reverentially out in front of them.

“That’s got to be the queen,” McKay muttered.

The queen was talking to the group, but her voice was too low to overhear. Teyla felt a surge of anger at their helplessness. John had been stuck in the ruins for at least an hour now.

Three of the villagers broke off from the main group, making their way up the hill toward the Atlantean’s hiding spot. Teyla ducked down lower into the brush, grabbing her handgun and slipping the safety off. Ronon had gone utterly still, and even Rodney was barely moving.

Just as Ronon was lifting his gun to shoot, the three villagers turned away from them and continued to climb the hill. Teyla could just make out the faint trail they were following, and she wondered where they were going. As they disappeared over the top, she breathed a sigh of relief—that had been too close. Ronon dropped his gun, and Rodney dropped his head to the ground.

She glanced back at the entrance of the ruins and saw the queen and five others enter the ruins. The rest of the group remained outside, relaxing as soon as their leader had disappeared. One man hovered near the entrance.

“Izyan. Don’t,” a villager called out, and the man near the entrance turned around. Teyla recognized him as the grizzly looking man in the tavern. The villager who’d called out to him was walking toward the man, but Izyan shook his head, anger creasing his face. A second later, he ducked into the ruins. The remaining villagers shook their heads, and Teyla sensed that the man—Izyan—had broken some taboo.

“That leaves eleven,” Ronon said.

“What about those other three guys?” Rodney asked.

“Gone—not my problem. I say we take out the eleven left behind and go after Sheppard.”

Teyla shook her head again, resting a hand on Ronon’s arm. The man was quivering with tension. She could see his jaw flex as he grit his teeth in an effort to keep control. Teyla glanced over the hill where the three villagers had disappeared.

“They were sent in that direction by the queen, and they are heading away from the village. I think we should follow them.” She looked up at Ronon, forcing him to make eye contact with her. “At the very least, it would be three against three.”

Rodney glanced between Teyla and Ronon, waiting for a decision to be made. Teyla could almost feel his relief when Ronon suddenly relented.

“Fine. We follow them,” he said. “But if they don’t lead us to Sheppard, we come back here and do this my way.”

ooooooooooooooooo

John gasped, jerking awake then blinking in a panic before remembering where he was—stuck in a maze of corridors in a ruined, underground complex with no lights. His clothes were almost soaked through from the moisture in the stone floor and wall. He pushed himself up from the half-slumped over position he’d slid into and bit back a moan of pain when abused muscles in his neck and back pulled at the movement.

John flipped the light of his P90 on and looked around him. He was still alone. He wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or worried about that. A glance at his watch told him it had been almost two hours since he’d first fallen through the ceiling.

He pushed himself up a little more, wincing at the pain that shot through his ankle when he moved it. He could feel a headache beginning to build behind his eyes as well. He dug through one of the pockets of his vest and pulled out a packet of Ibuprofen. It wouldn’t do much for the pain, but it might take the edge off a little. It might also help with the swelling.

He took a swig from his canteen. At least that was nearly full. John rested his head against the stone wall, calculating. If he rationed his water, he could last down here for hours, days even. He tried the radio again, out of habit more than anything else, with the same results—he was on his own for now.

John focused his attention back on his ankle. He hated to take his boot off, but his toes had gone numb. He was no medical expert by any means, but numb toes could not be a good sign.

“Could really use a doctor just about now,” he muttered. If he took the boot off, there was a good chance he’d never get the boot back on. If he left the boot on, though, the pressure from the swelling could be causing untold damage. It was the “untold” part that had him worried.

John pulled his leg toward himself as carefully as he could. The entire area was throbbing, but the outside of the ankle was the worst. The laces were bulging, stretched tight over the boot. He tugged at them, but they were firmly knotted. He bit back a whimper of pain when the laces refused to yield.

“Ah, screw it,” he said. He pulled out his knife and slipped the tip under one lace. It would be easier and a lot less painful to just slice through them.

A pop echoed down the hall, followed by a low-level thumping sound. John jerked up, grabbing his flashlight and looking for the source of the sound. He kept his knife in the other hand and held it in front of his face.

“Hello?” he called out.

The corridor was silent again. He waited a moment longer and was about to return to the business of cutting his bootlaces when he heard a scraping sound, like something being dragged over the rough stone floor. The sound echoed down the corridor, bouncing off the walls and amplifying as it traveled. With a grimace, John pushed himself up to a standing position, holding his P90 and knife in front of him.

“Is there anyone down here?”

The movement had stopped again. He took a step forward, almost collapsing when he tried to put any weight on his bad ankle. He leaned into the wall, breathing hard. He heard another thump, and the sound echoed around him, taunting him.

John sheathed his knife and tried to walk again. He couldn’t hold back the cry of pain as he forced himself to move forward. He used the wall as much as he could but he was forced to stop every few feet to give his ankle a rest. Sweat was pouring down his face, chasing the damp chill away.

His progress was excruciatingly slow, but he eventually made it to another hallway crossing the one he was on. He flashed his light down each one, trying to figure out which way to go next. The cross hallway curved gently, blocking his view after about thirty feet. The path in front of him extended into darkness, too far to see to the end.

Another scraping sound made the decision for him. It was coming from the hallway to the right. He staggered along, keeping his gun and light up just in case. A few minutes later, he came across another hallway crossing his own, and he shook his head in frustration. This place really was a maze.

He flashed his light again down each of the three paths, and started in surprise when he saw the back of a man sitting on a stone block about thirty feet down the left hallway. The man was leaning against the wall, his head bent forward. He looked to be as big as Ronon, but based on his clothing, John surmised he was one of the villagers.

“Hey!” he called out, he pushed away from one wall to another, and limped toward the man. The relief of finding someone else down here masked the pain in his leg for a moment.

The lights in this hallway flickered on, and John flipped the light off on his P90. The man had not moved. John called out to him again, feeling the first inkling of unease, and then reached out a careful hand intending to tap him. The villager looked vaguely familiar from behind.

“Hello…” John said, briefly touching the man’s shoulder.

The man fell backward and John lunged to catch him without thinking. The body was limp in his arms, and the head rolled back to reveal a face that was too pale. The eyes were open, but glassy and unseeing, the lips gray and washed out of all color. John flashed on the bodies he’d fallen on earlier and stumbled backward.

His ankle rolled underneath him as he stepped, and he fell to the ground hard. He screamed in agony at the fire bolts of pain that raced up his leg. It was almost overwhelming. His ears filled with a loud rushing sound, and the lights in the hallway seemed to waver and dim.

He closed his eyes, sucking in heaving gasps of air. His hands reached out for his throbbing ankle and foot, but he could not bring himself to touch it. He rested his head against the stone floor, letting the cold soak into his forehead.

A pressure against his leg finally forced him to open his eyes again. The body had dropped to the floor and the head lolled toward the wall. John forced himself to push away the agony in his leg and sit up. He scooted as close to the body as he could then turned the face toward him.

Izyan. He recognized the man who’d walked in on him and Maya. The same man who’d been with Maya in the tavern. His body was still warm, the limbs flopping in every which way. He hadn’t been dead for long. John swallowed back the bile that rose with the memories of the other dead people he’d found in these ruins.

He searched Izyan’s body, looking for any sign of injury or cause of death. When he finally lifted the man’s left arm, he found a deep gash on the inside of his forearm. It looked like a hole had been gouged into the soft under flesh of the arm. The edges were stained red and ragged, but the wound was no longer bleeding.

John dropped the arm and scooted away from him. His stomach clenched and he pressed his hand against his gut. He breathed in slow, deep breaths until his stomach finally settled down. When he opened his eyes, Izyan’s face was turned toward him, his jaw open in silent terror.

“What the hell is going on around here?”

* * *

 _Chapter 5_

Ronon led the way up the hill, following the small path the three villagers had taken. It was easy to see which way they were going, but he kept a sharp eye on the trail in case they left it at some point.

The drone of a soft patter started up around him, and he looked up at the gray clouds overhead. The sky had finally acted on its threat of rain, and the sound of drops hitting the thick brush was like a steady drumbeat, washing out all other sounds. He looked around carefully, making sure no one was sneaking up on them, but they seemed to be alone in the forest.

Ronon pressed forward, his thoughts turning to Sheppard as he followed the villagers’ trail in front of him. He tried to imagine what had happened to his friend—still trapped in the stone room? Or maybe he’d managed to get out and then had run into the queen and her consort of robed freaks. He shook his head. It was impossible to know, and dwelling on it wouldn’t help.

The path curved over the top of the hill and wound its way north, but the footsteps he’d been following veered off in the opposite direction. The villagers had left the trail after all. He studied the brush, marking off the areas where someone could set up an ambush and plotting the safest course through. Teyla and McKay had stopped behind him, waiting. He pointed to the tracks on the ground, then signaled them forward off the path.

Sheppard was either still in the ruins or back in the village. He didn’t like the idea of splitting up to search both locations—the villagers had already proven to be more sneaky and more dangerous than they had seemed at first glance. They would have to pick one location to search first. Sheppard’s last known location was in the ruins, so that seemed like the logical place to concentrate their efforts. Plus, the queen and her villagers were up to something no good in there. He thought of the murals in the old house, graphic in their details of blood and violence.

 _“The queen has asked us to prepare for a new sacrifice. The innocent has already been selected.”_

 _“Do you think it is one of those newcomers? The ones asking all the questions about the ruins?”_

 _“That is my guest. I was told the queen has been watching their movements since they arrived.”_

 _“Do you think they will uncover the secret of the ruins?”_

 _“Not before the queen has gotten what she needs of them.”_

The overheard conversation replayed again in his head, and Ronon shook his head in anger. The villagers had been playing them from the beginning. The old man in the tavern had no doubt been a part of the ruse, telling them right away what was really going on in this village but in a way that made all of them dismiss it as the ramblings of an old drunk. It was ingenious, really.

The rain continued to patter around him, but it was beginning to let up a little. A soft mist had grown near the ground from the rain mixing with the hot, humid air. McKay huffed behind him. He could even hear Teyla breathing more heavily than normal. The path they were on had evened out with the tracks running along the bottom of the hill.

 _The innocent has already been selected._

Who was the innocent? Sheppard? Ronon nodded in the affirmative, almost answering himself out loud. It would make sense. The ruins had been dead and abandoned, something the villagers did not discuss. They’d given the impression that they never set foot near the place. Then Sheppard becomes trapped inside, and a group of blood-drinking Wraith worshippers gathered outside the entrance almost immediately.

 _The secret of the ruins._ He wasn’t sure what that meant exactly. His only guess was that it had something to do with their Wraith worshipping rituals. McKay had said the ruins were Ancient in origin, but the villagers could easily have appropriated in the last 10,000 years and used it for their own purposes. He’d seen a lot of strange places—full of bizarre and sometimes extreme practices—in his seven years on the run.

Ronon dropped down to the ground, and Teyla and McKay copied his movements. He’d caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He pulled his weapon and signaled to the others to stay down. He crawled forward, peering up through the brush, his senses zoning in on his environment.

A second passed, then another. Ronon finally caught a slight sound on the wind, drifting voices too soft to be intelligible, but definitely human. They’d found their three villagers. He continued forward, ducking behind a tree stump. A quick glance around it showed him the three villagers pulling branches off the side of a hill, their backs to Ronon.

Ronon looked back at McKay and Teyla and waved them forward. By the time they reached him, he’d double-checked his weapon and glanced back at the villagers. The three men pulled at one last large, leafy branch, uncovering a dark hole burrowing into the side of the hill.

It was another entrance to the ruins. He could just make out the stone frame of the doorway. He stepped back to let Teyla and McKay look. When Teyla pulled back, she smiled at Ronon. He smirked back at her—she’d been right about following the three villagers. Ronon was more than willing to admit it, but first priority was taking control of the entrance, then finding Sheppard, then getting back to Atlantis.

“Are you going to kill them?” McKay asked, just as Ronon was about to spin out and shoot. The runner jerked back behind the tree, glaring at the scientist. McKay had whispered, but the villagers weren’t that far away, and the forest had grown deathly still again.

“I’m just saying, maybe we should stun them or something. We could interrogate them or something…”

McKay’s voice trailed off at Ronon’s continued glare. His gun had been set to stun, but his plan had been to shoot all three of them, tie them up, and head into the ruins, not interrogate anyone. He sighed, reformulating his plan. McKay was right—they did need information. Not that he’d admit that to McKay.

“It’s on stun,” he whispered. “I’ll try to save one for you to talk to, though.” With that he smiled, feeling the adrenaline of combat pounding through his veins, then spun out from around the tree and began firing.

ooooooooooooooooooo

John knew he had to get up and move. He didn’t want to look at Izyan’s dead body, but the man was right in front of him. His thoughts swirled around the other dead bodies he’d found in this place—the decomposing faces, the brittle flesh stretched over bone. He shivered uncontrollably.

It didn’t help that this hallway was freezing. The stone wall he was leaning on was ice cold. He had to get out of here. He had to move at least a few feet away. He stared down at his swollen ankle, wondering how much longer he could feasibly walk on it.

A soft tapping sound caught his attention. He thought at first it was more water dripping around him, but the tapping was growing louder.

 _Not water. Footsteps._

John braced himself against the wall, raising his P90 and wishing the Ancient lights would go off. They didn’t respond to his mental commands—the lights seemed to be automatic, if they worked at all. He swallowed against a suddenly dry throat, but his hands stilled and his breathing evened out. He may not be able to walk far, but he could still fight.

The footfalls grew louder. Whoever was coming was moving slowly, carefully. John licked his lips and stared down the barrel of his weapon. Izyan’s hallway ended about five feet farther down, intersected by yet another hallway.

The footsteps stopped suddenly, and John heard the quiet rustling of fabric swishing against itself. He strained his ears, feeling his heart beginning to pound as the adrenaline pumped into his bloodstream. There a whoosh of air—someone exhaling—and then the footsteps moved forward again.

If the lights had been off, John might have shot first and asked questions later, but the first thing he noticed was thick dark hair, curled and bobbing around thin shoulders. The figure looked up as she came around the corner, and gasped at the sight of John’s weapon trained right on her.

“Maya?” John exhaled, air rushing out of his lungs in relief.

“John, what are you doing here?” she asked. She stared at him sitting against the wall then to the body lying on the ground. “Izyan?”

John watched her step forward and kneel next to the man. He knew he should say something to her, but his mind had gone blank.

“Is he…?”

“Dead,” John answered.

Maya swallowed, reaching a hand out toward the dead man before pulling it back into herself. She shivered, but John couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or from the sight of the dead body at her feet.

“How did…how…is he…did you…” She couldn’t seem to finish any sentence. Her breaths came out in harsh pants, faster and faster as she digested the scene.

“I don’t know what happened,” John finally said. “I got stuck in here and was trying to find a way out, and then I thought I heard someone.”

Maya stared at him, her eyes bright but with an intensity that unnerved John. He swallowed, forcing himself to keep speaking. “I found him like that. He’s got a cut on his arm.”

Maya nodded, reaching out again toward Izyan’s face. This time she brushed her fingers over his sightless eyes, closing them forever. She shivered again, and wrapped her cloak tighter around her shoulders.

“What are you doing in here?”

John sighed, rubbing his forehead. “Teyla and I were exploring. I got trapped in a room and fell through the ceiling. I’ve been trying to find a way out ever since.”

The woman nodded as she pushed away from Izyan. She took a few steps back, glancing at John and the weapon still held firmly in his hand.

John noticed the look and lowered the gun, flipping the safety back on and clipping it to his vest. “Do you know a way out of here?”

“Yes, of course,” Maya answered.

“Mind showing me the way out?”

Maya was staring at Izyan again, but she shook herself at John’s question and came toward him. “Yes, I’m sorry. It is just…I was not expecting…”

John relaxed. She was obviously in shock. He reached a hand out to squeeze her hand, and the touch seemed to ground the woman. “Hey, it’s okay. I understand.”

Maya nodded again, taking a deep breath. “There is an exit not far from here, down that hallway,” she said, pointing at the hallway she’d just come down.

“Best news I’ve heard all day.”

Maya stood up. “Come, it should not take us long. We should tell someone about Izyan.” She took a few steps down the hall, then paused. “Do you think that he…that he did this…to himself?”

“I really don’t know, Maya. It’s possible, I suppose, but if someone else did this to him, I really don’t want to wait here to find out.”

Maya didn’t respond. She pulled her cloak around her shoulders again, wrapping her arms tightly around her mid-section.

 _Now or never._ John pushed himself up against the wall, grunting with the effort. His sore muscles had gotten stiff from sitting on the cold, hard floor. He let his right leg dangle for a second, and was already wincing at the throbbing pain that had kicked up a notch from the movement. Slowly, he set the foot on the floor and tried to put some weight on it.

His leg buckled immediately and he cried out at the pain that lanced up his entire leg. He managed to stay upright though. He pressed his back into the wall for balance, and closed his eyes. There was no way he was going to be able to walk unaided on that ankle.

“You are hurt?”

He opened his eyes to see Maya standing in front of him. She was staring down at his leg, her forehead creased in concern. John nodded, breathing deeply as he worked through the pain. He still smelled flowers and cedar wood in her hair, but another smell was wafting through the corridor—mold and stale water and rot.

“When I fell, I think I sprained my ankle,” he said.

Maya knelt down, gingerly touching the swollen boot, and John winced at the pain even the lightest touch caused. She glanced up at John.

“We should remove the boot.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking.”

Maya stood up then and John sensed a return of confidence as she grabbed his arm and draped it over her shoulder. She wrapped another arm around his waist and together they moved forward. John tried not to lean too heavily on her, but his ankle would hardly bear any of his weight. Maya guided them around Izyan’s body to the stone block the dead man had been sitting on when John found him.

John lowered himself down carefully, gripping the edge of the stone seat when Maya let go of him. He watched her as she gently pulled out his leg and studied the injury. When she started pulling at the laces, he bit down on his lip to keep from crying out and pulled Maya’s hands away.

“Wait,” he breathed out. He reached for the knife sheathed on his belt. “Use this. Just cut the laces.”

Maya took the knife, glancing warily at Izyan’s body before making short work of the bootlaces. “This will hurt,” she warned him as she began to ease the boot off.

John nodded. He held his breath as she pulled but couldn’t help the small whimper of pain that escaped him. The leather was tight around his ankle and it took some maneuvering to get it off. By the time she was finished, John was dripping with sweat from the exertion of trying not to scream. He was also shaking badly, and panting heavily.

“Easy, John,” Maya mumbled. She set his leg gently back on the ground and rubbed his back.

“It’s okay, I’m okay,” John said between heaving breaths.

Maya handed him his knife, then moved back to his leg, prodding the ankle. John leaned forward, moaning at her examination as she pressed on different parts of his leg and asked him whether he felt it. The bottom half of his foot was completely numb, but everything else was raging agony.

“This is not good,” Maya finally said. “Your ankle may be more than just sprained.”

That thought had occurred to John, but he pushed it away, refusing to deal with anything more than a sprained ankle. Regardless of the injury, they still had to get out of the ruins, and there was no way Maya was going to be able to carry him. He could wait here while Maya went for help, but he dismissed the thought almost as soon as it came to him he.

It made sense for Maya to go get help. He certainly wasn’t going to be moving very fast, and Keller would probably kill him for walking on his ankle as much as he had. But, there was a nagging sense of unease in the back of his mind. He looked at Maya as she tended to his ankle.

“What were you doing in here?” he asked her.

Maya looked up, her face expressionless. She hesitated a second before answering, and John’s sense of unease doubled. He couldn’t pinpoint it, but something just felt _wrong._

“I…” She glanced away, staring down the empty hallway. “To escape,” she finally said. “Sometimes, I just need to get away from the village and my life there. These ruins…whatever this place was, it must have been grand once, don’t you think?” She stared up at the wall sconces. “I’ve never known the lights to work before, though.”

“Uh, yeah, okay,” John stammered. It sounded believable enough. How many times had he wandered Atlantis, wondering what it might have been like 10,000 years earlier?

“We should brace your ankle,” Maya said, focusing her attention again on John. She pulled the sash hanging from her cloak, and began wrapping it around his foot and leg. John bit back another whimper of pain as she worked, but it was less painful than getting the boot off. When she was done, he sighed in relief.

“You may lean on me for support,” she said, standing up.

“Just a sec.” John dug through his vest again and pulled out another packet of Ibuprofen. He swallowed them down with water from his canteen, delaying the moment when he’d finally have to stand up.

Eventually, he could wait no longer. Maya helped pull him to his feet, once again draping his arm over her shoulder. She wrapped her own fingers around his belt and almost lifted him as he began to walk. John blinked in surprise—she was much stronger than she appeared.

He ignored the scent of her hair as they made slow progress down the hall. John leaned on both Maya and the wall, and while his ankle screamed with every step, it wasn’t unbearable.

 _You can do this, John. You can get out of this._

ooooooooooooooooooo

Teyla stood back, her gun trained on the three villagers. Ronon had stunned two of them in quick succession, and the third had been taken down with a shot to his leg. The first two were out for the count, but the last one was squirming on the ground.

“I can’t feel my leg. I can’t feel my leg. What did you do to me?” the man moaned and whimpered.

“Shut up,” Ronon growled, smacking him on the head. The man bit his lip, quieting down but still wiggling.

“Stop moving,” Teyla said. She lifted her weapon and pointed it at the man’s chest.

The man froze. Sweat poured from his face, and he shuddered as Ronon knelt down next to him. He glanced between Teyla and Ronon and McKay hovering in the background.

“What are you doing here?” Teyla asked.

The question seemed to galvanize the man’s courage. His face stilled and he stuck his chin out in defiance. “Just walking, enjoying the beautiful weather.”

Ronon grinned, but his voice was acidic. “You’re a Wraith worshipper. You’re all Wraith worshippers.”

“I am a member of the Order of the Kankardesh.”

“Same difference.” Ronon pulled out a long, curved knife hidden under his shirt. “I’m going to kill you.”

“Ronon, wait.” Teyla said, but she kept her gaze trained on the villager. “We were told the villagers never enter the ruins. What is this place? What are you doing here?”

“I will not speak.”

Ronon was still smiling. “Oh, you will.” He grabbed one of the man’s bound hands and wrapped his own hand around one of the fingers, and the man’s eyes grew wide.

Teyla grit her teeth, hiding her discomfort. She was not a violent person by nature, not by any stretch of the means. She did what was needed to survive—nothing more. Behind her, she could hear Rodney pacing, kicking up dirt and dry leaves as he walked.

“I hate it when you do this. They always scream and scream and scream,” the scientist mumbled, loud enough for the villager to hear.

The villager swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving visibly in his throat. He looked between Rodney and Ronon in a panic before turning pleading eyes to Teyla. Teyla frowned and kept her weapon trained on their captive.

“What are you doing here?”

The villager slammed his mouth shut, pressing his lips together in a fine, white line. Ronon’s smile morphed into a snarl and he began pulling the man’s finger backward. The villager’s face turned red as he struggled against the pain.

“I won’t…I won’t talk—aaaaggghhhh!” He threw his head back, screaming in pain as Ronon snapped the finger with a quick movement. Teyla flinched, but the villager was too distracted with his own predicament to notice her unease. He tried to roll over and curl into himself, but Ronon shoved him back and grabbed another finger.

“No, no please, don’t. Please, no.”

“Our friend is trapped in the ruins. Do you know what happened to him?” Teyla infused her voice with ice, letting the fear and anger of what might have happened to John pour into the words. Ronon growled, pulling on the second finger. Behind her, Rodney had turned away, covering his eyes with his hands.

“Please, stop. Please…” the man begged.

“Talk,” came Ronon’s reply.

The villager swallowed, looking at the finger that was now pulled taut. “Sheppard…he’s in the ruins…we heard…”

Rodney suddenly rushed forward, pushing past Teyla. “Where is he? Is he okay?”

The villager hesitated, but only for a split second. Ronon’s grasp on the finger grew tighter.

“I don’t know,” he ground out. “We heard…the queen said another sacrifice had been chosen and we were to come to the ruins. She’s already inside. We were supposed to wait here, keep watch over this entrance.”

“Sacrifice?” Rodney gasped. “She’s going to sacrifice Sheppard to the Wraith?”

Ronon jerked his hand, and the audible snap of the finger seemed to echo in the small clearing. The man screamed again, but this time, Teyla did not feel one tiny sliver of empathy for the man at her feet.

“Who is this queen?” Ronon asked.

The man was almost crying. He closed his eyes, whimpering in pain. His hand had began to swell under the two broken fingers. Teyla stepped up, giving him a sharp jab in the side with her foot to catch his attention.

“Answer the question,” she said. “Who is the queen?”

* * *

 _Chapter 6_

Maya peered around the corner of another intersection of hallways. John watched her move carefully a few steps into the middle of the two crossing corridors and tried to shake off the sense of unease that had settled into his stomach.

“We’re not lost, are we?” he asked, trying to look casual as he leaned against the wall. In truth, he was feeling anything but casual. He and Maya had been staggering down hallway after hallway for almost an hour now, and he was fast approaching the moment when his throbbing ankle just wouldn’t be able to take it anymore.

He glanced down at the offending limb, dangling in the air as he held it up. The toes were no longer numb, and he was grateful for that small bit of good news, but the numbness had been replaced with pain that spread from the tip of his toes up his entire leg.

And he was cold. The corridors had not gotten any warmer as they’d moved—as he’d expected them to become. He knew it was hot and humid outside, so the closer to the exit they got, the warmer it should become, or so he believed. He shivered again, stifling a sigh as Maya came back toward him.

“We are not lost,” she answered. “I’m sorry, John. I did not expect your injury would require us to move so slowly. I promise, we are almost there.”

 _There._ Not out of the ruins, not safe, but _there._

“What do you mean _there?_ Where is _there?_ ”

“Safety—the outside. What did you think I meant?”

John shook his head. He wasn’t sure what he meant. Maybe he was letting himself get too creeped out by his surroundings. “Sorry, I’m just…my ankle is killing me. I don’t know how much longer I can walk on it.”

Maya glanced down at his leg and bit her lip. She knelt down and fingered the swollen area, and John let out a hiss of pain.

“I apologize,” Maya said. “We should keep moving while we can.”

 _While_ I _can, you mean,_ John thought. But Maya was right—she was his best shot of getting out of here for the moment. Maya wrapped her arm around John’s waist again, taking most of his weight, and they began their slow hobble, turning down the left-hand corridor. The lights behind them turned off, and a few sporadic wall sconces flickered to life in the new corridor.

“Not very many lights work in this passage,” Maya remarked. John grunted in response, most of his energy focused on not collapsing in a heap.

As they moved, his mind flashed to Izyan lying dead in the hallway. John found it hard to believe the man would have taken his own life, but then again, he didn’t really know the guy or the villagers’ cultural or religious practices. They’d heard no sign of anyone else in the maze of corridors so far, so if Izyan had been killed, his attacker was long gone.

Or it was Maya.

John glanced down at the smaller woman. She was deceptively strong, but she didn’t sit around eating and drinking all day either. Laundry could be hard labor, especially if you were doing the entire village’s all day long every day of the week. Based on what he’d seen of Maya in the village, that seemed to be her job.

Could she have killed Izyan? She’d seemed quite upset at his death, but it could have been an act. John shook his head. At this point, he couldn’t worry about that. He had to get out of these endless hallways and back to his team.

The light above him flickered off then on again. The corridor itself curved slowly, disappearing far ahead of him.

“What’s up with these hallways? It’s a maze down here.”

“This place is very large.” Maya’s voice floated down the long hallway. “I think there were once many rooms, but most of the doors have long since been sealed shut.”

“Do you know what this place was for?”

“I have no idea. It has been abandoned for many generations.”

“You never found anything in here, in all your explorations?”

“Like what?” Maya asked, looking up at him in curiosity.

John shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just trying to focus on something other than my leg.”

“Do you need to rest?”

“No, I’d rather not,” he said. “Let’s just get out of here.”

They continued walking in silence for another few minutes. The lights were dimmer in this area, and John kept his eyes trained on the ground in front of him. It was littered with rocks and dirt.

Inevitably, his foot came down on a small rock, jerking his ankle just enough for the pain to lance from the tip of his toes to his head. He cried out as his leg collapsed under him, sagging to the ground as Maya tried without success to keep him upright.

She managed to slow his descent enough to prevent him from garnering any new injuries, but he still ended up on the floor. His hands dug into the ground as he tried to breathe through the pain, and Maya’s voice floated distantly and unintelligibly above him. He could smell the dirt and mildew in the stone below him, and he had the sudden urge to slam his forehead against the rock, as if the new pain would distract him from the agony of the old.

“John? John….please. John?”

John shuddered and gasped. It felt like his leg was being crushed in one of those wood chipping machines. His heart pounded in his chest, and the edges of his vision began to close in around him.

A light tapping on his face was the first thing he noticed after the roar of pain dialed down a little, and he opened his eyes to find he was lying on his back and staring up at the dark ceiling of the underground ruins. Maya was kneeling next to him, trying to get his attention, her face creased in fear and panic. It made him think of McKay all of a sudden, and John wondered where his team was. Looking for him, he hoped. Teyla had been in the ruins when he’d been trapped in the room, but surely she had made it out and caught up with the other two.

“John? Are you with me?”

“What?” he mumbled. He turned his head slightly and could feel the cold stone through his hair. His ankle still throbbed, but a little less so than before.

“You passed out, I think.”

“How long?”

“Just a few seconds,” Maya answered. “Can you walk?”

John pushed himself up on shaky arms. He could feel Maya’s small, warm hands on his back and arm as he slid over to the wall. She pulled him along, trying to support him as much as she could. He leaned back and closed his eyes, wishing he could sink into pain-free oblivion for just a few minutes.

A jerking at his belt had him stiffening up instantly, his eyes opening in alarm. He looked at Maya, relaxing only when he realized she’d only been pulling at his water canteen. She brought it up to his lips and held it while he sipped.

“You are very pale,” she said.

“I’ll be okay.” He dug through his vest again and pulled out his last pack of Ibuprofen. Not that they seemed to be doing that much for his ankle in the first place. He choked the pills down with another swig of water, and frowned at how light the canteen had become. It was at least halfway gone. So much for rationing.

Maya still knelt next to him, but she was looking down the hall as if lost in thought. Her face was perfectly silhouetted in the low light, and John remembered how she’d looked in the small shed as she’d stirred the flowery soap into the laundry tub.

“We’re okay, right?” he asked suddenly.

Maya looked at him, confusion clear in her expression.

“I mean, about before when you were doing laundry…this morning. I…uh…didn’t mean…” John stumbled, wishing he’d just kept his mouth shut.

Maya smiled, but her eyes remained strangely expressionless, and John felt a shiver run through his body totally unrelated to the cold stone floor he was sitting on. The feeling of unease grew, and he swallowed.

“We should, uh, get moving again,” he stammered.

“Of course, John,” Maya answered. She pulled John back to his feet and again wrapped an arm around him. In this position, he couldn’t quite see the expression on her face, but her voice was oddly blank. “We are very close—not much farther.”

ooooooooooooooooo

The map had been shoved in the back pocket of one of the dead villagers, and its discovery had cost the live villager one more broken finger. Ronon, Teyla, and Rodney knelt outside the side entrance, pouring over the new information.

“There are two levels,” Rodney said pointing at the paper in Ronon’s hands. He glanced at the villager, bound and gagged now and leaning against a tree. The man glared back, and Rodney felt a pang of sympathy at the sight of the man’s swollen fingers.

“The main entrance is up here,” Ronon said.

“And I believe John and I were exploring this hallway when he became trapped.”

“Do you know which room he was in?”

The map showed a complex maze of hallways criss-crossing over each other. Small rooms dotted along each corridor, their purpose unknown. To Rodney, it looked like a jumbled matrix of lines and boxes.

“I am not sure,” Teyla answered. She pursed her lips, leaning in closer to the map. “There are many more rooms shown on this map than what we saw. This place is much larger than I suspected.”

The others nodded. There were at least three more levels below ground, possibly even more. Rodney stared at the fading lines, trying to make sense of them. If Sheppard was in one of the rooms along the hallway Teyla had pointed out, the queen and her minions would have reached him pretty quickly. If he wasn’t in the room…

Rodney blew out a heavy breath in frustration. The place was a massive labyrinth. If Sheppard wasn’t in the same place he’d become trapped in, he could be anywhere. They could search for months and never find him.

“Stairs,” Ronon said, pointing to a cross-hatched box on the paper.

“If we go this way,” Teyla said, tracing her finger through the twisting lines, “we can work our way up to where John was.”

“This spot here,” Rodney said, pointing at a larger room on the level directly below the main entrance. “Do you think that’s the sacrifice room?” The room was larger than the others and roughly oval in shape. It had strange symbols drawn in the center, and the markings looked much more recent.

Ronon jumped up, taking the map to the villager. The man watched the runner approach and had already begun curling his remaining healthy fingers into a fist. Ronon whispered something and the man nodded. Rodney couldn’t hear what was being said, but he recognized that all the fight had gone out of the villager.

“He says that’s where they do the sacrifices. That’s where they’re taking Sheppard.” Ronon pulled his weapon, checking the charge. Rodney recognized the ferocious snarl that curled his lips back and bared his teeth. _Like an animal,_ he thought and shivered, but then he thought of the murals on the basement walls and their scenes of horrific torture, and he revised his image of Ronon as the animal. The villagers with their Wraith worshipping and human sacrificing were way more inhuman. Rodney would take Ronon’s growling any day of the week over the psychopaths they were about to go after.

“What about the queen and her cloaked freaks wandering around in there?” he asked as Teyla handed him the map and loaded her own weapon.

“Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, and hope we see her before she sees us,” Ronon answered. With that, he darted into the ruins. Rodney felt Teyla push him forward, into the dark corridor, and he forced unsteady feet and legs to keep him upright. He willed his hands to stop shaking.

 _Panic later,_ he thought to himself and hoped he wasn’t saying it out loud. _Right now, we have to save Sheppard’s ass. You have time to panic about wandering aimlessly through dark hallways filled with possibly cannibalistic villagers later._

ooooooooooooooooo

John stopped, leaning against yet another hallway. This one had no wall sconces, but lanterns were hung where the Ancient lights had once been. Maya let go of him and kept walking forward. She’d hardly said two words after John’s last collapse.

John reached for the gun in his thigh holster. The lanterns were lit, and their light flickered along the dark passageway. Someone had been down here recently to light them, but based on what he’d seen before, the villagers hated the ruins. John felt a slight shiver of adrenaline rush through him. This was not right—everything about this felt off.

“Maya?”

The woman paused, but she did not turn around or respond to him.

“This is a little weird, don’t you think?” John asked. In the soft glow of the light, he checked the safety on his weapon, then released the cartridge to count the bullets. Full load.

“Who turned the lights on down here?” He snapped the cartridge back in place and reloaded the chamber. “Maya?”

Maya had stopped moving completely. Even her hair seemed frozen in the dim light, and the hairs on John’s arms stood on end at the sight of her standing in the center of the hallway, utterly still.

“What are you playing at Maya? Where are you taking me?”

“Away,” she answered, yet she kept her back to him. “Out of the ruins, to safety.”

“Somehow, I’m not buying that anymore.”

Maya edged over to one side of the hallway, brushing her hands over the stones like she was blind. Her fingers found what they were looking for, and as they pressed into the edge of a crack in the wall, a door slid open and light spilled out into the corridor.

“See? Outside.”

John blinked, but his grip on his gun tightened. The light was definitely brighter, but it had the same flickering pattern of the smaller lanterns on the walls. Wherever that room led, it wasn’t out into natural sunlight.

“I don’t think so.”

Maya finally turned toward him. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes shone bright with excitement. John felt his stomach curl into itself. He pushed himself away from the wall, trying to balance as much as he could on one leg. He raised his gun and reached for his radio for one last desperate call.

“Ronon, Teyla, Rodney—anyone? Come in.”

The radio was silent. Maya stepped forward, but stopped when John turned his attention back to her. He kept his gun pointed at her chest.

“Not another step closer,” he said, his voice low and dangerous. Bolts of pain raced up his leg as it dangled uselessly beneath him. There was no way he would be able to fight or run.

“Come, John.” Her voice sounded like it had earlier, like the young woman who had stumbled across John in the mess of corridors behind him.

“What happened to Izyan?” he asked instead.

“I do not understand.”

“What did you do to Izyan?”

“I did nothing to him.” Maya took another step forward. Her face was pale in the flickering firelight as she stepped out of the brighter light of the doorway. “The end is just through here.”

“End? What end?”

“The end of the ruins. There is an exit through here, just a few more steps.” She took another step forward.

“Back off,” John snarled, feeling his finger tighten around the trigger. He did not want to shoot her, hated the thought that he might have to shoot her, but he would do whatever it took to protect himself.

“Do you not wish to exit the ruins?”

“I do wish to exit the ruins, but why is it so dark? And cold? It feels like we’ve gone deeper into this crap hole of a maze, not closer to an exit.” He stared at her, looking for some clue as to her intentions. Would he be justified in pulling the trigger? Was she looking for a little roll in the hay, so to speak, or something more sinister?

She smiled at him, and the movement looked forced, almost painful.

“I don’t know what you’re playing at,” John said. “But you’re up to something.”

Something flickered in Maya’s eyes and John had the sudden sensation that they weren’t the only two in this corridor. Her smile dropped suddenly and her face morphed into something very dark and very angry.

“The sacrifice has been chosen. You will come now,” she said. Her voice had changed, too, almost like she’d become possessed.

John felt icy tendrils wrap around his heart. The feeling of unease was now screaming in a full panic, and if he could have run, he might have just done so.

“I don’t think so,” he said. He stood his ground, his gun steady in his hand. It was his only option.

Before he could do anything else, he heard a soft scraping sound behind him. If he’d had two whole, healthy legs beneath him, he might have been quick enough. Instead, he spun and swung his gun around just as the soft patter of footfalls sped up. He caught sight of two, three, four figures, their faces hidden in shadows from the deep hoods of their cloaks, and then something smashed into the side of his head. He dropped in a boneless collapse, unconscious before he even hit the ground.

ooooooooooooooooo

Ronon ran through the dark corridors, his flashlight held out in front of him. He could hear McKay breathing heavily behind him, but the scientist was keeping up. Teyla was close behind as well, watching their backs, but they had yet to run into anyone.

He paused as he reached an intersection of corridors and glanced down at the map McKay held in his hand. The scientist waved his hand forward, telling them to go straight. Ronon followed his directions without question. He’d gone maybe three or four steps into the dark hallway when lights on the walls flickered to life.

“Whoa!” McKay gasped.

Ronon had his gun up, looking for any signs of movement, but the hallway was empty. He could hear the faint buzzing from the lights.

“Definitely Ancient. They must be responding to my ATA gene.” McKay had moved over to one of the wall sconces and was tapping its side with his finger.

“We need to keep moving,” Ronon said and took off again down the hall. The lights definitely made it easier to move faster, but it gave their position away instantly. Anyone waiting for intruders would see the lights long before they saw Ronon.

He reached another intersection, then another, then another. McKay kept his nose to the map now, trusting his teammates to protect him and directing everyone with confidence on when to turn and when to keep going straight. The ruins had looked like a maze on the map, but the reality was far worse. If Sheppard was wandering down here without a map, he’d never make it out on his own.

“Left,” McKay called out as they approached yet another intersection, and Ronon barreled around the corner, his finger poised over the trigger of his gun. He would shoot fast and hard—the plan was a little reckless, but he hoped that the cloaked villagers wouldn’t expect someone to come flying at them like that. Plus, it suited his style.

McKay called out another turn, and Ronon whipped around the next corner. This hallway curved slightly to the right and he surged forward, wincing at the soft sound of his shoes slapping the wet, stone floor. McKay huffed behind him, but Teyla was completely silent.

The lights above him flickered, and he barely registered a dark mass at the end of the hallway before he flung himself against the wall and froze. He reached a hand out, grabbing McKay and pushing the man behind him. Teyla stopped right behind McKay, raising her weapon and shooting a questioning glance at Ronon.

Ronon shook his head. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen, but he’d caught sight of something that was out of place in the abandoned ruins and he’d acted on reflex. He moved forward slightly, peering around the slow curve of the hallway. The cold stone soaked into his shoulder as he pressed himself against it.

There was no movement in the hallway. Ronon finally let himself relax a little as he moved forward. He saw a couple of large stone blocks in the middle of the floor that might have fallen out of the wall or the ceiling. This corridor ended in a T-intersection, and his eyes searched for any signs that they weren’t alone.

He heard the soft patter of water drops hitting stone or possibly even a puddle somewhere nearby, but there were no other sounds. He moved forward a little more, straining to see into the dark shadows.

There, next to one of the stone blocks. His grip tightened on his gun as his eyes outlined the dark shape. That was what he’d seen a few seconds before, what he’d reacted to. The dark shape coalesced into legs, a torso, an arm splayed to the side, still and unmoving.

Dead.

“Oh, my God,” McKay whispered, catching sight of the body. “Is that…Sheppard?”

Ronon closed the distance between him and the body, still listening for the sounds of anyone else in the hallway. He glanced down long enough to see that it was a villager and not Sheppard before continuing to the end and checking the intersecting hallway. This hallway was dark and quiet, and Ronon’s instincts told him they were alone for the moment.

“Looks like a villager,” he answered, heading back toward his teammates. Teyla and McKay were moving toward the body. Ronon knelt down, feeling the man’s neck even though he already new the outcome. The skin was gray and cold to the touch.

“It’s that Izyan guy,” McKay suddenly said.

Ronon looked down at the man’s face and nodded. He hadn’t really looked before, but now that he did, he saw that McKay was right.

“What happened to him?” Teyla asked to no one in particular.

Ronon ran his flashlight over the man’s body and settled on his arm. He lifted it up slowly. Rigor mortis had already begun to set in, and he heard McKay moan in disgust behind him. He turned the stiff arm as much as he could and finally caught sight of the jagged cut in the soft under flesh of the forearm. The wound was small, and there was a small puddle of blood next to the body.

“Did he bleed to death?” McKay asked.

“Doesn’t look like enough blood here, but…” he didn’t have to finish. He knew McKay was thinking the same thing he was. He could almost see the picture of the hordes of cloaked villagers holding their cups under the wound in the arm to drink the blood.

Ronon shivered. He’d seen a lot of weird and horrible stuff in the last ten years, but this whole experience was rapidly reaching the top of his list of things he’d rather not experience, ever.

“I guess the queen wasn’t happy about him coming in here,” McKay mumbled.

Ronon nodded, looking up at the scientist. Before he could say anything, though, Teyla gasped.

“What is it?” he asked her.

She held up a small piece of paper, training her flashlight on it. Ronon recognized it instantly.

“Ibuprofen pack?” McKay asked.

“It is empty,” Teyla responded.

“Sheppard was here,” Ronon said.

“Before or after Izyan?”

Ronon shrugged, standing up and walking away from McKay. He stared at the ground around him. The stone floors would make it hard to pick out any tracks, but not necessarily impossible. He flashed his light into the dark corners, studying every grain of dirt, every damp patch of floor.

“If Sheppard’s popping Ibuprofen, that means he’s hurt, right?” Ronon heard McKay say behind him.

“He may be injured, but obviously he is not so injured that he is unable to move,” came Teyla’s reply.

Small pockets of dirt and dust had accumulated over the years in the corners and crevasses of the floor. Ronon followed them. One small sign, a little bit of disturbed dust here and there could tell him a lot.

“Right, yeah. That’s good.” McKay’s voice hummed behind him. Ronon only half listening to the words. “Although if he hadn’t been able to move, we would have just found him.”

“Assuming his injury took place here. It is pointless to worry about what we do not yet know, Rodney. I am confident we will find him soon.”

Teyla had a point, but Ronon didn’t think Sheppard had been injured here. The ground was too settled. He heard McKay mumble something in return as he moved into the other hallway.

His light flashed over the floor and he grinned in triumph. “Got something,” he announced. The other two quickly joined his side, and he pointed to the ground. “Two sets of footprints leading away from here.”

“Two?” McKay squeaked. “Oh, please tell me one of them is Sheppard.”

Ronon moved forward and squatted down, studying a pattern in the dirt that only he could see. “Over there, near the wall. Looks like he hurt his right leg. He’s limping pretty badly.”

Teyla moved forward, staring down the dark hallway. “What about the second set?”

“Much smaller, possibly a woman’s.”

“Possibly the queen’s,” McKay said, shuddering.

Ronon pointed down the hallway. “They went that way, deeper into the ruins.”

He heard McKay moving behind him, then the distinct rustle of paper as he pulled out a map.

“Oh, no,” he whispered. Ronon looked up at him, waiting for him to clarify although he had a pretty good idea already of what the scientist was going to say.

“What is it, Rodney?” Teyla asked.

“That way leads to the sacrifice room.”

* * *

 _Chapter 7_

The pounding pulsating throb in his head was the first thing John noticed. It dragged him up from the depths of unconsciousness, relentless in its insistence. He could feel warm stickiness clinging to the side of his head above his ear. It oozed through his hair and over his skin to pool beneath his head.

A small part of his brain warned him not to open his eyes or try to move, but the sudden memory of Maya standing in front of him scowling and the cloaked figures rushing up from behind jerked him to full consciousness. His eyes flew open and he lifted his head at the sense of danger rushing through him. His head exploded in agony. He moaned, dropping back down at the onslaught.

“He is awake.”

John heard the voice, but it sounded muffled, and he couldn’t quite piece together what was going on. The only thing he knew was that his head had finally eclipsed the pain in his ankle. He lay as still as he possibly could, dragging in oxygen through his nose as he tried to calm himself.

He was lying on a cold, hard surface. It felt rough and chiseled and he identified it as being made of stone. The room itself felt relatively warm, and he could just see flickering light behind his eyelids. Fire, he guessed. The soft rustling of clothing and the whoosh of breathing around him was as clear a sign as any that he wasn’t alone. His mind screamed at him to move, to wake up, to fight, but his body refused to obey.

A hand on his forehead turned his head to the side, and he groaned again at the sharp stabs of pain that movement caused. He could smell rotting flesh and copper and mildew and fresh wood, and his mind bucked at the images each scent conjured.

“His head is still bleeding.”

“Not very much. The blood loss is minimal.”

Again, the voices. He could not identify them, although he thought one of them sounded familiar. He was suddenly aware of tight straps over his arms and chest and another one over his legs. The sensation of being trapped did what the small voice in the back of his mind had been screaming at him to do. John’s eyes flew open just as a man in a gray cloak released his head and stepped away.

The room was round in shape, with a large fire burning at the far end. He could just see over the tops of his feet to the massive fireplace. Murals and drapes covered the walls, looking like something out of a medieval castle. His vision blurred in and out as he looked around, stopping him from focusing on whatever they depicted. In the wall, the Ancient light fixtures had been replaced with large candles.

“It is time,” a woman’s voice said, and John recognized Maya. She walked into the room wearing a gown made of deep red material. Her hair was pulled back with some kind of gold band, and John would have thought her beautiful if not for the look of utter cruelty darkening her eyes. “Let us begin the ceremony.”

John started as more people moved into his peripheral vision. They wore gray cloaks, tied on with red sashes. Their hoods were pulled up over their heads, but in the flickering light, he would catch glimpses of their faces, and he recognized some of the people from the village.

“No, wait,” he said, his voice rough and hoarse. He cringed at the note of helpless begging, but he couldn’t stop it. “Please don’t do this. Maya—”

“Ssshhh…” Maya soothed, running a finger down the side of his face, but John shivered at her touch. Her hand was ice cold and in John’s muddled mind, her face seemed to have lost all sense of humanity.

A low hum began as the villagers encircled him, and then the humming evolved into chanting, but John couldn’t make out the words. Maya moved around the circle, sometimes touching the villagers, sometimes running her hand across John’s leg or chest or forehead.

John started to squirm, but the bands held him tight against the table. His legs were tied down together, but his arms were stretched open on either side of him. He realized then that he’d been stripped of his shirt and vest, and all of his weapons removed. He twisted again, feeling the cold stone table dig into his shoulder blades.

The voices grew louder. John heard something about a queen, a blood sacrifice, and the Kankardesh, but he was breathing too fast to focus his energy on anything other than Maya circling around him.

“What are you doing, Maya? What’s going on?”

She ignored him, disappearing from sight as she moved passed his right hand side. John heard more noises above his head, and then suddenly the chanting stopped.

The silence was almost worse than the noise. Everyone stilled, including John, and some oppressive danger seemed to crush in on him. Maya reappeared on his left, holding an ornate gold cup and a jewel-crusted dagger that glittered in the light. She moved to his side, staring down at him with a blank expression, as if she didn’t really see him at all.

“By the blood of unbelievers, we live a thousand times a thousand years—stretching into the past, reaching into the future,” she spoke in a low voice. There was no inflection in any of the words, but it sounded powerful. She held the knife above her head, and a villager stepped forward to twist John’s left arm so that the under flesh of his forearm faced her.

“Don’t do it, Maya,” he begged. He thought of Izyan lying dead in the ruins with only a single knife wound to his arm, and he realized far too late that Maya had been responsible all along, and that he had followed her blindly.

“Blood is the symbol of life,” Maya continued, ignoring John. “To drink it is to live forever, as our brothers and sisters in the sky.”

John could make no sense of the words. His mind was filled with the image of the dead bodies he’d fallen on, and he wondered how long it would be before he joined them. Maya brought the knife down slowly and John followed it with his eyes right up until she pressed the tip into the soft flesh of his arm.

“May the Kankardesh live a thousand years more.”

Voices erupted around him as the villagers repeated her words. He caught a brief flash of a dozen hands pulling out cups from the pockets of their cloaks, and then he jerked at the sudden burning sensation in his arm. Maya pressed the tip into his skin, breaking through it with ease. She was breathing heavily now, her face illuminated with sadistic joy.

John managed to hold back a groan throughout most of the process, but when Maya pulled the knife back out of his arm, he couldn’t help the whimper of pain that escaped. He felt a cold sheen of sweat covering his face, and he turned his head to look at the pulsating burn of his newest injury.

Blood welled up from the stab wound, dark red. _At least she didn’t hit an artery,_ he thought, then realized that probably meant slowly bleeding to death versus the more preferred quick death. The blood, however, was dripping out of his arm at a fast enough pace.

Maya leaned forward toward him, whispering directly into his ear. “I will take my fill of you, John Sheppard.” As she straightened up, she held the bloodied knife out in front of her and slowly licked it clean. John shuddered. Her face had contorted into something that he could only describe as pure madness.

She held her cup under the wound in his arm, allowing the blood to flow into it, but she was too impatient to wait for it to fill. She leaned over suddenly, and John felt her mouth close around the knife wound, sucking in the blood as it pumped out. His chest was heaving as he tried to breathe and he could feel his heart pounding faster and faster in his chest.

 _Slow down,_ he screamed at himself, as if he could slow his own heartbeat. The faster his heart pounded, the faster the blood drained from his body. Maya finally stood up, smiling, and John turned away from the sight of her blood-stained teeth.

“Please…please stop this…” he begged, hardly realizing he was speaking out loud. He felt the cup pressed against his arm disappear, and he opened his eyes to see Maya disappear behind him.

This seemed to be everyone else’s cue. The villagers standing quietly in the circle suddenly pressed forward, jostling each other in near panic as they moved in on John. Another cup was soon pressed to the side of his arm, then another, then another, and John let his eyes flutter closed, hoping the end was near.

oooooooooooooooooooooo

Teyla raced after Ronon as the man made a mad dash down hallway after hallway. She could feel the desperation building in her heart, and she wondered if Ronon felt it too—if that was what was pushing him on so quickly.

Rodney ran next to her, breathing heavily. She kept a hand on his arm in case he stumbled or started to lag behind, but he didn’t, and for that she was grateful. The hallway darkened once again, the Ancient lights broken long ago.

As she rounded a corner, she almost ran straight into Ronon’s back. The man had stopped moving, standing still and straight as he studied the new hallway. Teyla skidded to a stop, almost slipping on the wet stone floor, and Rodney did the same.

This hallway was different than the others. Its wall sconces had long since been replaced with homemade lanterns similar to the type she’d seen in the tavern and inn the night before. The lanterns were lit, however, casting an eerie glow in the otherwise unremarkable corridor.

Ronon held a fist up as he crept forward, and Teyla and Rodney both held their weapons out in front of him. Rodney glanced at Teyla, his eyes wide. Sweat glistened off his forehead, and his cheeks were flushed red from the exertion of keeping up with Ronon. Teyla nodded, trying to instill as much confidence in the man as she could.

They moved forward, and as Teyla’s eyes adjusted to the light, she spotted a doorway halfway down the hall. Ronon moved quietly toward it, and even Rodney had grown silent.

As they approached, she could just make out the sounds of people moving around inside the room. From what she remembered of the map they had found, this had to be the sacrifice room—and their best hope of finding John. She thought of the cloaked figures and Rodney and Ronon’s descriptions of the wall paintings they had found, and she felt her heart beat rapidly against her ribs. She dreaded the prospect of entering the room and finding John’s lifeless body drained of blood.

In front of her, Ronon suddenly scrambled backward and pressed them against the wall. A second later, four hooded figures emerged from the room. She raised her weapon, ready to fire, but the four villagers turned immediately away from them without a glance and walked in the opposite direction down the hall. When they disappeared around the next corner, Teyla let go of the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Ronon glanced at her before moving slowly toward the door again. There were now four less villagers to deal with in the room, but she wasn’t sure what their leaving meant for John. _Enough wondering,_ she chided. She pressed lightly against Ronon’s back, anxious to get this over with and find John.

Ronon paused just outside the door, took a deep breath, then spun into the room. Teyla ducked in after him, her own weapon raised. Ronon took down three of the villagers in quick succession. The remaining men had been stunned into frozen surprise but were quickly recovering. Most of them were clumped around a table in the center of the room, and cups clattered to the floor as they scrambled backward for cover.

Teyla glanced at the table and saw John strapped down. His body was still, his head lolled to the side and turned away from her. Rage rushed through her body, tightening the finger over the trigger of the gun as some of the braver villagers started to rush toward her.

Their bodies jerked backward as she fired. In the back of her mind, she felt horrified at the loss of life. She was a warrior, but she did not take others’ lives with ease. For the moment, though, she buried her feelings in cold calculation, using the sight of John’s limp body to fuel her anger.

Within seconds, the villagers were all dead. Teyla had turned toward the large fireplace where some local weapons were stored when she heard a rustling sound behind her.

“Stop!” Rodney screamed, and she and Ronon spun at the sound of his cry. A woman in a dark red gown stood poised over John, a knife held firmly in both hands. The queen. She glanced up at them and Teyla recognized Maya, the laundry woman from the village. Her lips and teeth were stained red with blood.

“You are too late,” Maya said, her eyes alight with maniacal glee. “I have been replenished—drunk the blood of an unbeliever. I cannot die.” She smiled then, and plunged the knife toward John’s chest.

Three gunshots echoed throughout the room. Maya was flung backward from the impacts, her eyes glossed over in death as she fell to the floor, and the knife dropped harmlessly at her feet. Rodney and Ronon stood next to her, frozen, and then slowly all three of them lowered their weapons.

“Sheppard,” Rodney said.

Teyla tore her gaze away from Maya’s upturned face and devoted all of her attention to John. Rodney reached out almost tentatively for the pulse point in their team leader’s neck. He closed his eyes as he dug his fingertips into the flesh. A second passed, and then he jerked his head up to look at his teammates.

“He’s alive,” he breathed out, and Teyla felt her legs wobble at the release of tension. “It’s weak and really fast,” he added.

She and Ronon surged forward. Ronon pulled a knife and began slicing through the leather bands that held John to the table while Teyla moved around to the bloody gash in his arm. John’s skin was ghostly white, and she gasped at the sight of the blood splattering the floor where the villagers’ cups had dropped.

“He has lost a lot of blood,” she said. “We need to get him to Atlantis quickly.” She dug into her vest and pulled out two pressure bandages. She tied both of them around his arm and hoped they would be enough to stem the small flow still trickling out of the wound and pooling under his arm.

“They did this to Izyan, too. The knife wound is the same,” Rodney mumbled. She felt Ronon beside her seething with anger.

Once the wound in the arm was bandaged, she checked the rest of him. Rodney was examining a very swollen-looking ankle wrapped in a strip of cloth. Teyla ran her hands over John’s chest, neck, and head, and cringed when her fingers brushed against the dried blood in his hair.

“He has been hit in the head as well,” she said as her fingers brushed over the goose egg-shaped welt. She tapped the side of his cheek. “John? Can you hear? Can you wake up?”

John made no response. His skin was cold to the touch, and even his lips were washed of color. His chest rose and dipped in slow shallow breaths, and Teyla pressed her hand against the left side of his chest to reassure herself that he was still alive.

Ronon cut through the last binding, releasing John once and for all. “Come on,” he urged. “The rest of the villagers must have heard the gunfight. We have to get out of here.” Without waiting for anyone else, he scooped John up in his arms, not unlike the way Teyla picked up her child, and made his way to the door.

“Go left,” Rodney called out as he and Teyla followed him. Ronon turned immediately in the direction the four villagers they’d first seen leave. Teyla nodded—it would take too long to leave the way they’d come, and if she remembered the map correctly, this way should take them up to the main entrance quickly.

She pushed her way in front of Ronon, taking point and prepared to clear a path all the way back to the stargate. Pounding footsteps echoed down the hallway in front of her as the people outside of the ruins rushed toward them.

Teyla raised her weapon, her finger poised over the trigger. She would do whatever it took to protect her team.

oooooooooooooooooooooo

The race through the ruins was a blur to Rodney. In the dim light, he could just make out Sheppard’s head bouncing and rolling against Ronon’s shoulder as they ran. If he’d had enough oxygen in his lungs, he might have said something to the runner about taking it easy.

The sound of a P90 exploded in front of him. Teyla. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her so angry, and he almost felt bad for the people who got in her way. Almost. They were moving again, their feet pounding up a wide, circular staircase. Sheppard’s uninjured arm dangled from Ronon’s grasp, swinging limply as they moved.

Rodney glanced behind him, fearful that more villagers might try to sneak up behind them, but the hallways were dark and empty. His mind replayed the carnage of the sacrifice room, and he almost gagged. The memory of the violence was like raw flames in his mind, the pain of it physical as it pounded behind his eyes.

The team emerged from the staircase, and Teyla’s P90 exploded again, joined with the thumping whoosh of Ronon’s blaster. The hallway was momentarily lit up by the flashes of gunfire and the screams of panic and fury. Rodney raised his own weapon, but he didn’t dare fire—not with Ronon, Sheppard, and Teyla in front of him.

He looked back again, trying to focus. He was bringing up the rear—he was watching his team’s six. He strained his ears for the first sign of pursuit behind them, but the staircase remained silent.

The gunfire ceased abruptly and they were running again. Down one corridor, then another. As their feet pounded against the stone floor, Rodney looked around and realized this hallway looked familiar. They were getting close.

Teyla paused outside of a doorway, and the only sound Rodney could hear was that of his own heaving breaths. Ronon stopped as well, shifting Sheppard’s weight in his arms as he adjusted his grip. Sheppard’s head hung backward, pulled down by gravity in a painful looking stretch, and Rodney stepped forward. He lifted Sheppard’s head as carefully as he could, leaning it forward so that it rested more comfortably against Ronon’s chest. Ronon froze, allowing Rodney to finish and nodding gratefully to the man when he was done.

They heard more footfalls ahead of them, and Teyla suddenly spun out into the doorway. Rodney stepped forward this time, pushing his fear to the back of his mind. The sight of Sheppard helpless in Ronon’s arm galvanized him into action, and for the moment, he felt like he could do anything.

The two villagers running into the room never knew what hit them. Teyla was running forward before they’d even hit the ground, securing the archway entrance on the other side of the square room. Lanterns had been hung in this room as well, and their soft flickering glow reminded Rodney way too much of the sacrifice room.

Within minutes, they’d made their way through the main entrance hallway, and Rodney almost breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of natural sunlight pouring into the door at the far end. Teyla had apparently adopted Ronon’s strategy of hitting the villagers fast and hard before they had a chance to react and mount a defense, which suited Rodney just fine. The faster they got out of here, the better.

He had just made it to the entrance and was ready to step outside when he heard a muted clicking sound behind him. He spun instinctively and raised his weapon. His finger squeezed the trigger automatically a split second after he spotted the man in a gray cloak emerging from one of the side alcoves. The man stumbled backward, dropping a crude looking rifle as he slid to the floor.

Rodney didn’t have time to look at him or think about how close he’d just come to being shot in the back. Ronon and Teyla dashed out into the clearing, screaming as they fired at the handful of villagers left to stop them. Rodney heard a clap of thunder and felt hot air whoosh past his head as a villager narrowly missed hitting him. The man collapsed against two quick shots from Ronon’s blaster.

And then they were in the trees. Rodney’s ribs squeezed in around his chest, threatening to collapse his lungs. All pretense of trying to move quietly through the woods fled his mind and he pushed burning legs just to keep up with the others. Sounds of pursuit surrounded them as the villagers converged on their position.

Of course they were going to the stargate. That would be where Rodney would make his final stand if he was trying to stop someone from escaping his clutches. He glanced up at Ronon and Teyla and saw that they had slowed down. They weren’t on any recognizable path, but he knew they were moving toward the clearing where the stargate sat.

Sheppard’s head had slipped off Ronon’s shoulder again in the mad dash through the woods. Rodney cringed at the sight. In the bright light of day, Sheppard looked worse than ever. His skin was gray, almost translucent. Dark bags underlined eyes that were half open, and his mouth hung open, his muscles utterly relaxed. He looked dead.

Rodney swallowed the bile that suddenly surged up his throat at the sight of his friend’s body, and he pumped his legs faster to catch up to Ronon.

“Wait,” he whispered, and Ronon stopped, looking down at the man in his arms in alarm.

Rodney pressed his fingers into Sheppard’s neck, willing every deity in the universe to let the man still be alive. He sagged in relief at the faint fluttering against his fingertips. Sheppard was deeply unconscious, his eyes glassy and unfocused. Rodney pressed his eyelids closed and readjusted his head on Ronon’s shoulder.

They moved forward again until the gate was just in sight. Teyla crouched behind some bushes, watching the clearing. Ronon was easing Sheppard onto the ground, and Rodney crawled forward, reaching out to support some of the man’s weight.

“How is he?” Teyla asked, moving back toward him.

“Hanging on for now,” Rodney muttered, his hand brushing skin that was too pale and too cold. “We have to hurry.” He stared down at his friend, not sure what he expected. Maybe for Sheppard to suddenly pull himself up with superhuman strength or stamina, shake off their hands, mutter an _I’m fine._ He’d done it enough times in the past for Rodney not to immediately dismiss the thought as ridiculous.

But not this time. Sheppard remained limp and lifeless, oblivious to all around him. His chest shuddered in quick, shallow, ragged jerks as breathing suddenly became more difficult. Teyla was holding Sheppard’s wrist, as if the feel of his pulse beating against her fingers was the only evidence left that he was still alive.

Rodney looked up suddenly at the sound of more people arriving at the gate. Ronon tensed next to him, and Teyla leaned protectively over Sheppard’s body.

“The queen is dead! Killed in her own chamber!” a woman’s voice called out.

Rodney felt dread curling inside of him. How the hell were they going to get off this planet? Finding Sheppard had seemed like the most overwhelming task before, but now he knew they were only halfway there. Ronon crawled forward to survey the small crowd at the gate and Rodney watched him, his heart thumping in his chest.

“Can you two carry him?” Ronon asked, turning back to his teammates.

“What?”

“I’ve got a plan.”

“What plan?” Rodney asked. Teyla remained silent next to him, a death grip on Sheppard’s arm.

“Shoot everyone at the gate, dial the alpha site.”

“That’s not a plan,” he sputtered. “That’s just…you.”

Ronon grinned, something angry and reckless like the man had nothing left to lose. “Hasn’t failed me yet. Get ready to come when I tell you to.”

Teyla immediately began gathering Sheppard up in her arms, and Rodney jumped in to help. He kept one eye on Ronon’s back, saw the muscles bunch near his shoulders, and knew a split second before it happened that the man was about to pounce.

In the end, the fight at the gate was anticlimactic compared to what they’d been through in the ruins. The villagers cried out in alarm at Ronon’s sudden appearance, either not expecting him so soon or not expecting him from that direction. By the time Rodney and Teyla stood up, weighed down with their burden, the handful of people milling around in front of the DHD were down and the path to the gate was clear.

The forest erupted behind them as more villagers arrived, weapons in hand and faces contorted in rage, and Teyla and Rodney began to run. Ronon fired his weapon and a 9mm he’d somehow got a hold of, dialing the alpha site at the same time. The gate kawooshed into existence, and its rippling blue surface had never looked so inviting.

“Go Rodney!” Teyla yelled, and Rodney needed no further prodding. He pressed forward, Sheppard body sagging into his arms, Teyla falling into step beside him, Ronon’s looming presence behind them screaming and shooting, and then Rodney was surrounded by the familiar rush of the wormhole as it whisked them all away from the deranged, psychopathic, blood-sucking, lunatic Wraith worshippers of yet one more village in this Godforsaken galaxy out to get one Doctor Rodney McKay.

* * *

 _Chapter 8_

John hovered on the edge of death, oblivious to the chaos and the violence and the fear around him. Maya’s face faded into a background of gray and blood and the muttering chants of blood-drinking villagers, and then the background faded into nothing.

He missed his team exploding into the room, missed the frantic run through the ruins and forest in Ronon’s arms, and through the stargate to the Alpha site and then Atlantis in McKay’s and Teyla’s. His arm had stopped bleeding at this point, but the blood loss had been extensive enough to send Keller and the medical team into a frantic battle to save his life, for Woolsey to run down the stairs and stumble the last few steps at the sight of John’s pale face, and for his team to sag in exhaustion as he was whisked away into the depths of the infirmary.

John’s first awareness of still being alive came over two days later. He wasn’t sure how long his eyes had been open, but suddenly he realized that the darkness had been replaced with something a little less dark—shady greens and grays and blues. When he realized his eyes were open, sounds began filtering in and he let quiet beeping and a gentle hum wash over him.

There was no pain—it took another moment for him to become fully aware of that. His last definitive memory was of agony. Shards of fire raking up and down his leg, a headache pounding behind his eyes as he stumbled through endless hallway after endless hallway…

The memory of a sharp knife slicing into his arm seared through his mind, and he gasped, seeing Maya leaning over him again and sucking the blood seeping out of the stab wound. The beeping sound near his head grew faster, its frantic pace rattling John’s nerves even more. The humming sound abruptly cut off and Teyla’s face suddenly appeared in his line of sight.

“John?”

John blinked. It was Teyla—not Maya. His teammate and friend. His lips moved and he breathed out a shuddering sigh. The greens and blues coalesced around her head, and he finally recognized the ceiling, the beeping, and the feel of a starched sheet covering him.

Atlantis.

“John, you are safe. You are home.”

John nodded. He could feel tubes pulling on his skin, heart monitor pads stuck to his chest, and a nasal canula hooked under his nose. He breathed in the oxygen, almost tasting the plastic of the tube. The rapid beeping on the monitor near his head began to slow down, and Teyla smiled. She reached a hand out, resting it lightly on the side of his face.

“I am going to go get Doctor Keller. I will be right back.”

John nodded again. He could feel a bandage wrapped around his head, and he vaguely remembered being jumped from behind. Another image of Maya, her lips dripping blood as she smiled at him, flashed through his mind and he sucked in a deep breath. Something tight was wrapped around his arm, and he pushed at the blanket covering him to see what it was.

His arms were heavy and uncoordinated, and he recognized the hazy, floaty feeling of some serious pain medication. He turned his head to look around the dark infirmary and saw the quieter pace of the night shift. His leg was propped up and heavily bandaged, obscuring some of his view. He shivered, feeling a sudden chill, and thought again of the dark ruins, the damp abandoned corridors, and the cold stone seeping into his bones.

Footsteps echoed across the dark infirmary, and he closed his eyes, half-expecting Maya to suddenly turn around the corner, carrying the scent of wood and flowers and death.

“Colonel?” Doctor Keller called out.

John forced his eyes open to look up at the tired, worried face of the physician. She smiled down at him, grabbing his wrist and holding it. John swallowed, feeling exhaustion pressing down on every muscle in his body. Teyla sat on his other side, intertwining her fingers through his and resting a warm hand on his shoulder.

Warm. He shivered again as the cold crept in further.

“Are you cold, Colonel?” Keller asked.

“Yeah,” John breathed out. He hardly made a sound, but the doctor seemed to understand. She turned around and spoke to someone out of sight for a few minutes.

John zoned out a little as Keller checked him over, responding to her questions with nods or shakes of his head. Anything more seemed too much of an effort. Finally, the doctor sat down and waited for him to focus on her.

“You’re in bad shape, but you’ll be okay.”

John nodded again, and Teyla squeezed his hand in reassurance. A thousand questions had begun running through his mind: what happened to him? What had happened to the others? What happened to Maya? How did his team find him? How did he get back to Atlantis? The fatigue faded a little as he struggled to remember the events following his capture by the villagers. He’d been in the ruins, attacked by Maya and the other villagers, and then…

“John? Are you listening to me?” Keller’s voice interrupted his thoughts. He wondered how long she’d been talking, but all he could think to do was blink up at her in confusion.

Keller exchanged a worried frown with Teyla, and John tried to track their silent communication, but his head was beginning to ache. The pain medication had ebbed back a little, and his body was starting to shout its abuses at him. He was shivering almost constantly now, and he could feel a deep, sickening ache in his joints.

“You lost a lot of blood,” Keller said. “Your team got you back here pretty quickly, and we gave you a pretty hefty blood transfusion, but your body was in hypovalemic shock. You’re going to feel the effects of that for awhile.”

John shivered harder, his teeth almost clattering. He moaned, blinking away the memories of cold, dead bodies lying discarded in a small room, undisturbed until he crashed down on top of them. A nurse arrived then with an armful of blankets, and Keller and Teyla draped them over him.

Heat began to pool around his body, and the violent shivering finally subsided a little. He relaxed as they spread more blankets over him, the weight of the layers pressing into his body and reminding him he was home and safe. His eyes were threatening to pull shut, the lethargy sweeping over him. He heard Keller say something about letting him rest, and then Teyla was there, pressing her forehead into his. She was speaking, her voice a lilting thrum in his ears, but he slipped off to sleep before he could make sense of the words.

oooooooooooooooooooo

John was woken up again the following day, and he blinked at the early morning sunshine pouring through the window. Keller hovered around him, checking monitors and writing things down in his chart, oblivious to the fact that her patient was awake and watching her.

She turned around and jumped a little when their eyes met, and then her face broke out into a smile. “Good morning, Colonel. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

John sucked in a deep breath and sunk a little deeper into the covers. He still felt cold, although he wasn’t shivering yet. His body felt heavy and a little numb as well, and he wondered how long ago Keller had given him whatever medication he was on.

“I just topped off your pain medication,” she said. Her hands fluttered over the equipment, studying the readings.

“I thought for sure your ankle was broken, but everything is intact,” she continued, finally settling down and pulling up a stool to sit next to him. John blinked in response. His ankle. He remembered it had hurt pretty badly.

“It’s a bad sprain, though, so you won’t be walking on it unaided anytime soon.”

John continued to stare at her. He could feel sleep pulling at him again.

“…minor surgery to repair the muscle in your arm…”

Surgery? John turned his head, forcing himself to focus on what Keller was saying. He was starting to get a little freaked out about the way his attention kept zoning in and out.

The heart monitor must have picked up on it, because Keller stopped mid-sentence to glance at the screen measuring his heart rate. She rested a hand on his chest, as if she could soothe it back into a normal rhythm by touch alone. “Hey, it’s okay. Your arm’s going to be fine. The knife wound was a little deep, but it should heal up without any problems.”

John sucked in another ragged breath, feeling the plastic tube of the nasal cannula pull at his nose. His arms were wrapped around his stomach and his hands clenched into fists. He tried to force the muscles to relax. He was safe and warm in Atlantis.

 _Well, not warm but definitely safe,_ he amended as his muscles began to tremble. Keller frowned and turned away for a moment, and John used the time to try to settle himself. No more than a minute later, Keller and a nurse were spreading a warm blanket over the ones already covering him.

“You’ve managed to avoid any infections so far,” Keller said, once again sitting down on the stool. The nurse had disappeared without John even realizing it, but the warmth of the blanket was seeping into his skin again. His body relaxed and he felt himself beginning to drift off.

“You’ve got a mild concussion, but I can now safely say there’s no brain damage. I’m a little concerned about the effects of shock, though. We’re keeping you on oxygen for the moment, and your urine output is down, which could indicate damage to your kidneys. We’re still in the wait-and-see phase with that, so hopefully it will right itself in the next few days.”

John let his eyes close, letting Keller’s words wash over him. He knew he should be interested in what she was saying and concerned about his health, but he couldn’t dredge up the energy to respond, not even a nod of the head. All he wanted to do was go back to sleep.

“Colonel?” Keller’s hand on the side of his face had him opening tired eyes instinctively. She was standing over him, a slight frown playing across her features giving into a look of resignation.

“You’re going to be feeling very tired and weak for awhile. I’ll let you rest now, but I want to get some food into you later.”

John’s only response was to slip back into the dark quiet of sleep.

oooooooooooooooooooo

“By the blood of unbelievers, we live a thousand times a thousand years—stretching into the past, reaching into the future.”

Maya’s voice whispered in his ear. John shivered, feeling cold soak into every part of his body while watching the warm flicker of firelight against the dark ceiling. He couldn’t see Maya, but he could feel her, hear her hissing above his head.

“Blood is the symbol of life,” she continued. Her voice was low and harsh and inhuman.

John couldn’t move. Couldn’t lift his head or shift his arms. He was tied down, bound to the table the villagers had stretched him out on. He tried to turn his head, but every muscle in his body betrayed him, refusing to obey his command.

“You cheated. You’re not supposed to look.”

“I didn’t cheat.”

John tried to blink, and it took a tremendous amount of effort to get the lids of his eyes to close and then open again. The firelight grew brighter as it danced across the ceiling far above his head, but the rest of the room remained in shadow. He could sense movement around him, but he couldn’t see it. His heart pounded in his chest.

“To drink it is to live forever.”

“Definitely the blue one.”

“Wrong. It was orange.”

John tried to talk, to scream, to make any kind of sound, but he was gagged. His tongue was pressed into his throat and his chest stuttered as he tried to breath.

“My turn. Is that my spoon?”

“May the Kankardesh live a thousand years more.”

“I think he’s waking up.”

“Should I get Keller?”

“You’re the stranger asking questions about the ruins.”

The voices weaved around each other, each battling for John’s attention. He moaned at the onslaught, not making sense of any of them. The firelight had grown pale but bright, and he felt a shiver of ice spread down his arms and over his chest and stomach.

“Sheppard? Buddy?”

That voice was louder and gruff and close to his ear. John twitched at the sound, dragging in a deep breath. The air smelled stale and clean and dry, and he felt the back of his throat dry out.

“Colonel?” Another voice. He’d heard this one before, recently. “Colonel, can you open your eyes for me?”

“Come on, Sheppard. Wake up,” said a third voice.

“Rodney!” The second voice. He knew her—Keller.

“What?”

He imagined Ronon rolling his eyes, and he opened his own to catch the reaction. The runner was standing over him but staring at someone else standing near the foot of his bed.

“There you are,” Keller said, and John forced his head to roll across the pillow. He cringed at the pull in his neck, the muscles stiff and sore. Keller pulled down the blanket covering him—somehow he’d lost the layers he knew he’d gained earlier—and the thin hospital gown. He jerked at the cool disc of the stethoscope being pressed into his skin, and felt goose bumps break out along his arms.

“Sorry, this will just take a moment,” she said. “Why don’t you two grab some warm blankets for him?”

He saw Ronon nod, then heard two sets of footsteps patter away and disappear. Keller moved quickly, listening to his heart and lungs and then tying the gown back up around his neck and tucking the lone blanket around his shoulders.

“Everything looks good—your body seems to be bouncing back, including your kidneys. Do you think you can eat? I’d really like to get some food in you.” Her voice was serious, but she smiled when John nodded.

Ronon and McKay reappeared just as John was starting to shiver from the endless cold. They spread the thick layers of heated blankets over his form and then Keller was raising the bed so that he could sit up a little.

“Why is he always cold?” McKay asked.

“It’s just his body recovering from his ordeal. He’ll be fine,” Keller answered. She patted John’s knee. “I’ll be right back with dinner.”

John looked around. The infirmary was dark again—not the dark of the middle of the night, but it was definitely well into evening. A table littered with at least a dozen half-eaten jello packs had been pulled up next to his bed. Ronon and McKay stood on either side of him, shifting awkwardly on their feet.

“So, how are you doing?” McKay finally asked. John leaned his head back into the pillow, enjoying the warmth of the blankets. He shrugged a little.

“How come you’re not talking?”

Up till that point, John hadn’t noticed he wasn’t talking. He was about to shrug again, but the look in McKay’s eye made him freeze. He swallowed, forcing a bit of moisture into his throat.

“I’m okay,” he tried to say, but his voice was hoarse from disuse and came out more as an unintelligible, whispered croak.

He swallowed again, and then Ronon was holding a cup with a straw near his lips. John opened his mouth tentatively, but as soon as the water hit the back of his throat, he realized he was absolutely parched. He sucked in heavily through the straw, choking on the water. Ronon suddenly pulled the straw and cup away, and then McKay was helping him lean forward and rubbing a warm hand awkwardly on his back until the coughing stopped.

John pushed back toward the bed, feeling the muscles in his neck quiver at holding up his heavy head. McKay immediately switched from rubbing to supporting him until he was laying back again, although still propped up. John wrapped his arms a little tighter around his body beneath the covers, already tired enough to go back to sleep.

Instead he looked back at the jello packs spread out on the table. “What’s that?” he asked, his voice a little stronger and a little more clear.

McKay and Ronon both looked down at their feet, sheepish grins covering their faces. “Oh, that,” McKay finally answered. “We…uh…we were getting a little bored waiting for you to wake up.”

“I believe they were having a jello-eating contest,” Teyla said, carrying a tray of food toward John’s bed. John sat up a little, his smile sincere at seeing Teyla.

She set the tray on the table next to John’s bed and swung it over his lap. There was a bowl with some kind of fragrant soup in the middle, a glass of juice, and a piece of soft, white bread. John hadn’t really been hungry, but now that the food was in front of him, it did look appealing.

“We were trying to guess the color based on taste alone. I won,” Ronon said.

“You cheated, you mean,” McKay griped. “There is absolutely no difference between the pink one and the red one.”

“Maybe your palate is just not sensitive enough.”

“Not sensitive enough…” the scientist spluttered. “That’s it. I want a rematch.”

“Anytime.”

“Right now.”

John smiled at the two as they settled down to their table and began lining up the packs of jello again. They haggled over whose spoon belonged to whom, and who got to go first, and whether or not they should find something to blindfold each other with.

“John, are you not hungry?” Teyla asked. She had pulled up a chair and was sitting on his other side.

John looked down at his food. He did want to eat, but the thought of pulling his arms out from under the blankets and letting in the cool air was too unappealing. He wasn’t that hungry.

Teyla made the decision for him when she picked up the spoon, dipped it in the soup, and held it in front of his lips. John hesitated a moment then opened his mouth and swallowed the soup.

It was warm and spicy, and he almost groaned in pleasure. Teyla dipped the spoon again and brought it toward him.

“Teyla,” he said, shaking his head. He didn’t really want her to feed him—he wasn’t an invalid…was he? He was warm finally, and he wrapped his arms around more tightly around his body.

Teyla said nothing, just raised an eyebrow and held the spoon until John opened his mouth again. Ronon and McKay started their jello game, careful to keep their focus on each other and the jello in front of them and not on John, for which he was grateful.

“How’d you guys find me?” John asked, halfway through his dinner, and Teyla spent the rest of the meal explaining the murals of Wraith worshippers that Ronon and McKay had found, of their discovery of the back entrance to the ruins and the sacrifice room where John was being held, and of their battle to get him out of the ruins and back to Atlantis.

“Why are all the freaks in this galaxy after us?” McKay asked once John had finished his dinner and Teyla had moved the tray away.

“We’re just lucky,” Ronon answered.

“Oh, you’re hilarious.”

“That’s what Lorne said.”

“Yeah, well, Lorne can shove that up his—”

“Rodney.”

“Sorry, Teyla. Hey, is it my turn or your turn?”

“Mine.”

“You’ll never get this one.”

John smiled, letting the voices float around him. He was warm and cozy and full, and he could feel sleep pulling gently.

“Yellow.”

“Damn it, Ronon.”

Teyla laughed, keeping one hand on John’s shoulder. Ronon pulled off his blindfold and held up the yellow jello pack in triumph, grinning when McKay threw his spoon down on the table in a huff.

John blinked against the fatigue threatening to drag him under, but he knew it wouldn’t be long before he lost that battle. Teyla laughed again and then Keller stalked over, eyeing with incredulity the dozens of jello packs the runner and the scientist had managed to consume between them. John would have laughed as well, especially when McKay challenged Keller next and produced six more unopened jello cups. Instead, he let himself sink into oblivion, safe and warm and ever so slowly on the mend.

END


End file.
